Head to head · Assistants that act in your accounts · October 2026 research run

IronClaw vs Tomo

IronClaw scores 66.7 (B) on agent readiness against Tomo's 13.1 (F), and leads in every scored category. Both do assistants that act in your accounts.

Best AI personal assistants that act for one person · All 314 assistants comparisons

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 0
  • Agent ergonomics, 69 against 0
  • Security & auth, 66 against 0
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 10
  • Maintenance & community, 74 against 54
  • Transparency & trust, 75 against 47

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

Tomo F

Best for People who want accountability, check-ins and reminders by text, including in group chats.

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

Watch for

No API, MCP server or A2A endpoint for an outside agent.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runIronClawTomoEdge
Reliability16%206715IronClaw +52
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.2740IronClaw +74
Agent ergonomics13%16.2690IronClaw +69
Security & auth14%17.5660IronClaw +66
Payments & pricing10%12.56010IronClaw +50
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.87454IronClaw +20
Transparency & trust7%8.87547IronClaw +28
Negative events≤15-20
TotalB 66.7/100F 13.1/100

Facts side by side

FactIronClawTomo
KindAgent harnessPlatform
VendorNEAR AIMapo Labs, Inc.
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
TransportsHTTP
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingFreemiumPaid
x402nono
LicenceMIT OR Apache-2.0Closed service under Tomo's Terms of Service (Mapo Labs, Inc., last updated 24 September 2026).
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-09-292026-09-29
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.

Tomo

Tomo is a hosted personal AI over iMessage and an iOS app, centred on goals, check-ins and reminders, with regular iOS releases since April 2026. No outside agent can call it, there's no free plan, and no status page, security contact or subprocessor list was 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

Tomo

  1. Don't plan to call Tomo from another agent. It answers only the owner's iMessage, group chats it's added to and the iOS app.
  2. Tell the owner that adding Tomo to a group chat applies its terms to every participant.

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, IronClaw or Tomo?

IronClaw scores 66.7 (B) on agent readiness against Tomo's 13.1 (F), and leads in every scored category.

Are IronClaw and Tomo open source?

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

Other comparisons with IronClaw or Tomo

Disclosure

Tomo 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.

Machine-readable

For companies

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