Get an audit

Head to head · Assistant proactive · October 2026 research run

IronClaw vs Poke

IronClaw scores 66.7 (B) on agent readiness against Poke's 37.6 (F), and leads in every scored category. Both do assistant proactive.

Best AI personal assistants that act for one person · All 190 assistants comparisons

IronClawNEAR AI · Agent harness B66.7/100#288 of 986 PokeThe Interaction Company of California Inc. · Platform F37.6/100#955 of 986

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 51
  • Schema & documentation, 74 against 42
  • Agent ergonomics, 69 against 30
  • Security & auth, 66 against 24
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 30
  • Maintenance & community, 74 against 31
  • Transparency & trust, 75 against 58

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

Poke F

Best for One person who wants an assistant in their text messages that reads and drafts mail, manages a calendar and reaches other apps through MCP.

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

Watch for

No documented setting for which actions need approval before Poke sends, deletes or spends. Release notes mention email draft approval only in passing

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runIronClawPokeEdge
Reliability16%206751IronClaw +16
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.27442IronClaw +32
Agent ergonomics13%16.26930IronClaw +39
Security & auth14%17.56624IronClaw +42
Payments & pricing10%12.56030IronClaw +30
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.87431IronClaw +43
Transparency & trust7%8.87558IronClaw +17
Negative events≤15-20
TotalB 66.7/100F 37.6/100

Facts side by side

FactIronClawPoke
KindAgent harnessPlatform
VendorNEAR AIThe Interaction Company of California Inc.
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
TransportsHTTPHTTP
AuthOAuth or keyAPI key
PricingFreemiumFreemium
x402nono
LicenceMIT OR Apache-2.0Proprietary service under Poke's Terms of Service. The poke npm package (CLI and Node.js SDK) declares MIT
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-09-292026-06-25
Terms last updatedno document linked2026-03-17
Privacy policy last updatedno date given2026-09-11
Customer content may train modelsyes
Terms restrict automated accessyes
Terms restrict benchmarkingyes
Terms or service can change without noticeyes
Arbitration or class-action waiveryes
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.

Poke

Hosted assistant that answers in Apple Messages, WhatsApp, Telegram and RCS and acts in Gmail, Outlook, calendars and MCP servers. Plan prices and a status page are public. No approval settings, credential storage, model providers or retention periods are documented, and customer content trains models unless Maximum Privacy is selected.

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

Poke

  1. POST JSON to https://poke.com/api/v1/inbound/api-message with a Bearer key from Kitchen. Legacy pk_ keys work only on the deprecated /api/v1/inbound-sms/webhook
  2. Expect only {"success": true} back. Poke's answer goes to the owner's message thread, not to the caller
  3. Do not retry a POST blindly. No idempotency key is documented, and a repeated message may make Poke act twice
  4. Treat an API key as full access to the owner's mail, calendar and integrations. Create one key per automation and revoke it when done
  5. Avoid the prefilled integration link with apiKey in the query string for real secrets. Enter the key in the form or use npx poke@latest mcp add -k

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, IronClaw or Poke?

IronClaw scores 66.7 (B) on agent readiness against Poke's 37.6 (F), and leads in every scored category.

Are IronClaw and Poke open source?

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

Other comparisons with IronClaw or Poke

Machine-readable

For companies

Do agents find, use and choose your tools?

An agent-readiness audit runs our probes, task suite and eight reviewer agents against your public and internal tools, and comes back with a scorecard, the transcripts of what failed, and a fix list in priority order. From $2,500, re-run included. We never take payment to move a rank. We do help companies earn one.

Get an auditSee a sample report