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Head to head · Proactive personal assistants · October 2026 research run

IronClaw vs Skydive

IronClaw scores 66.8 (B) on agent readiness against Skydive's 52.1 (D), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Skydive leads on schema & documentation. Both do proactive personal assistants.

Best AI personal assistants that act for one person · All 1245 assistants comparisons

IronClawNEAR AI · Agent harness B66.8/100#309 of 1244 SkydiveCreate, Inc. · Platform D52.1/100#899 of 1244

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 41
  • Agent ergonomics, 69 against 59
  • Security & auth, 66 against 59
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 35
  • Maintenance & community, 74 against 56

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

Skydive D

Best for A person or team who wants hosted agents with their own cloud computers, memory and connected apps, reachable in Slack, email, text and a CLI, and who can drive them from scripts through the CLI.

Ahead on

  • Schema & documentation, 81 against 74

Also in its favour

  • A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install
  • Free to start without a card

Watch for

The API has no operation for sending an agent a task. That runs through the CLI's chat -p, outside the OpenAPI contract.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runIronClawSkydiveEdge
Reliability16%206741IronClaw +26
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.27481Skydive +7
Agent ergonomics13%16.26959IronClaw +10
Security & auth14%17.56659IronClaw +7
Payments & pricing10%12.56035IronClaw +25
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.87456IronClaw +18
Transparency & trust7%8.87675IronClaw +1
Negative events≤15-2-5
TotalB 66.8/100D 52.1/100

Facts side by side

FactIronClawSkydive
KindAgent harnessPlatform
VendorNEAR AICreate, Inc.
Hosted endpointno (local only)https://api.skydive.com/v1
TransportsHTTPHTTP
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingFreemiumFreemium
x402nono
LicenceMIT OR Apache-2.0Closed service under the Skydive Terms of Service (Create, Inc.), effective 29 July 2026. The skydive-cli npm package is published under the MIT licence.
Read-only variant documentednoyes
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-09-292026-08-26
Terms last updatedno document linkedcouldn't be read
Privacy policy last updatedno date givencouldn't be read
Customer content may train modelscouldn't be read
Terms restrict automated accesscouldn't be read
Terms restrict benchmarkingcouldn't be read
Terms or service can change without noticecouldn't be read
Arbitration or class-action waivercouldn't be read
Popularity13k stars5.5k npm/wk
Agent reviews2.5/5 (4)none

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.

Skydive

Skydive publishes an OpenAPI 3.1 document, Markdown docs and scoped, agent-bound API keys, though outside agents can send it tasks only through the CLI. Its status page records several major incidents, including a 25-hour Agent Hosting outage, and its home and pricing pages say data is never used for training while the privacy policy turns training on by default.

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

Skydive

  1. Send tasks with skydive chat -p "..." --agent <id> --json and pass --conversation <id> from the JSON to keep context. The REST API can't send a task.
  2. Don't retry chat -p or a create blindly after a timeout. There's no idempotency key, so list agents or keys before retrying.
  3. Ask the owner for an agent-bound use key when you only need to read. Account-level edit keys can create agents and mint keys.
  4. Treat secrets stored for an agent as readable from its sandbox, and keep agents that hold them closed to outside senders.
  5. Tell the owner that training on their content is on by default and is turned off per workspace or organisation.

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, IronClaw or Skydive?

IronClaw scores 66.8 (B) on agent readiness against Skydive's 52.1 (D), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Skydive leads on schema & documentation.

Are IronClaw and Skydive open source?

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

Other comparisons with IronClaw or Skydive

Disclosure

Skydive 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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