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Head to head · Assistants reached by message · October 2026 research run

IronClaw vs Orbits

IronClaw scores 66.7 (B) on agent readiness against Orbits's 15.6 (F), and leads in every scored category. Both do assistants reached by message.

Best AI personal assistants that act for one person · All 834 assistants comparisons

IronClawNEAR AI · Agent harness B66.7/100#288 of 1010 OrbitsNemus AI, Inc. · Platform F15.6/100#997 of 1010

Which one, for what

IronClaw B

Best for One technical owner who wants a self-hosted assistant over Gmail, Calendar, Slack and Telegram with credentials kept out of the model's reach.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 67 against 15
  • Schema & documentation, 74 against 10
  • Agent ergonomics, 69 against 0
  • Security & auth, 66 against 0
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 20
  • Maintenance & community, 74 against 54
  • Transparency & trust, 75 against 43

Also in its favour

  • Open source

Watch for

Global auto-approve defaults to on in the 1.4.1 source, so tools marked ask (send, trash, delete) run without a prompt. Only financial, approval and budget effects always ask

Orbits F

Best for Families who want one shared assistant for calendars, lists, meals, chores and household email.

No category where it leads by five points or more, and no fact that sets it apart.

Watch for

No public agent API, as llms.txt states.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runIronClawOrbitsEdge
Reliability16%206715IronClaw +52
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.27410IronClaw +64
Agent ergonomics13%16.2690IronClaw +69
Security & auth14%17.5660IronClaw +66
Payments & pricing10%12.56020IronClaw +40
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.87454IronClaw +20
Transparency & trust7%8.87543IronClaw +32
Negative events≤15-20
TotalB 66.7/100F 15.6/100

Facts side by side

FactIronClawOrbits
KindAgent harnessPlatform
VendorNEAR AINemus AI, Inc.
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
TransportsHTTP
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingFreemiumPaid
x402nono
LicenceMIT OR Apache-2.0Closed service under the Orbits Terms of Service (Nemus AI, Inc.).
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-09-292026-10-13
Terms last updatedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno date given
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Popularity13k starsnone

Verdicts

IronClaw

Credentials stay in an encrypted store and are injected at the host boundary, and extensions declare per-tool permissions, network targets and OAuth scopes. The global auto-approve setting defaults to on in the 1.4.1 source, so tools marked ask, such as gmail.send_message, run unprompted until the owner turns it off.

Orbits

Orbits is a family household app whose assistant, Bit, runs shared calendars, lists and meals, reads household email and places restaurant calls after approval, with iOS releases every week or two. No outside agent can call it, prices appear only as App Store in-app purchases, and no status page, security contact or named subprocessors were found.

Before you call either

IronClaw

  1. Open Settings and turn off global auto-approve, or set send and delete tools to ask each time, before connecting mail or chat accounts
  2. Install with the release installer and run ironclaw onboard. 1.x does not migrate 0.29 data, so use a fresh home directory
  3. Call POST /api/v1/responses with the bearer token from ~/.ironclaw/reborn/webui-token. Keep under 30 requests in 60 seconds
  4. Resolve approval and OAuth gates in the web interface. The Responses API fails the turn instead of surfacing them
  5. Connect MCP servers over HTTP only. The stdio transport is rejected

Orbits

  1. Don't plan to call Orbits from another agent. llms.txt says no public agent API is offered.
  2. Tell the owner the assistant needs an Orbits subscription bought in the app, and that any trial appears only at purchase.

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, IronClaw or Orbits?

IronClaw scores 66.7 (B) on agent readiness against Orbits's 15.6 (F), and leads in every scored category.

Are IronClaw and Orbits open source?

IronClaw is open source (MIT OR Apache-2.0). No open-source release is listed for Orbits.

Other comparisons with IronClaw or Orbits

Disclosure

Orbits competes with LocalGhost, which Anchor Terminal's founder builds. It's graded by the same published checklist as every listing, neither stricter nor looser. Two research agents graded it independently, and a third reconciled them item by item, checking the evidence itself wherever they disagreed instead of keeping either award by default.

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