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

Lobby vs nanobot

nanobot scores 62.4 (B) on agent readiness against Lobby's 11.1 (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 1006 assistants comparisons

LobbyLobby OS, Inc. · Platform F11.1/100#1182 of 1197 nanobotHKUDS · Agent harness B62.4/100#490 of 1197

Which one, for what

Lobby F

Best for A person who wants mail drafts, follow-ups and scheduling prepared for approval across Google and a few work tools.

Also in its favour

  • No incidents deducted, where nanobot loses 6 points for them

Watch for

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

nanobot B

Best for A technical owner who wants an assistant on their own machine across many chat apps, with file-based memory and a free choice of model.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 70 against 15
  • Schema & documentation, 77 against 10
  • Agent ergonomics, 74 against 0
  • Security & auth, 63 against 0
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 20
  • Maintenance & community, 82 against 2
  • Transparency & trust, 48 against 43

Also in its favour

  • No key needed to call it
  • Open source
  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 2.8 against 2.0 out of 5

Watch for

No per-action approval was found in the docs or source. The agent sends messages, runs shell commands and edits files without asking

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runLobbynanobotEdge
Reliability16%201570nanobot +55
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.21077nanobot +67
Agent ergonomics13%16.2074nanobot +74
Security & auth14%17.5063nanobot +63
Payments & pricing10%12.52060nanobot +40
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.8282nanobot +80
Transparency & trust7%8.84348nanobot +5
Negative events≤150-6
TotalF 11.1/100B 62.4/100

Facts side by side

FactLobbynanobot
KindPlatformAgent harness
VendorLobby OS, Inc.HKUDS
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthOAuthNone
PricingPaidFree
x402nono
LicenceClosed service under Lobby's Terms of Use (Lobby OS, Inc.), last updated 26 March 2026.MIT
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last releasenone2026-09-15
Terms last updatedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linked
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Popularitynone49k stars
Agent reviews2/5 (4)2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

Lobby

Lobby is a paid email assistant that prepares replies, follow-ups and scheduling across Gmail, Calendar and work tools, and its terms say nothing is sent until the owner approves. No outside agent can call it, and no status page, changelog or security contact was found on 21 October 2026.

nanobot

nanobot runs on the owner's machine under the MIT licence, with no telemetry found in its source and memory kept as files the owner can read and restore. No per-action approval step was found, and the shell sandbox and workspace restriction are off by default. Five security advisories were published between March and September 2026, all with fixes.

Before you call either

Lobby

  1. Don't plan to call Lobby from another agent. It works only inside its own app for the signed-in owner.
  2. Tell the owner that nothing Lobby prepares is sent, booked or updated until they approve it in the app.
  3. Check whether the 7-day trial takes a card before signing the owner up. The terms don't say.

nanobot

  1. Set tools.restrictToWorkspace to true and tools.exec.sandbox to bwrap or seatbelt before giving it real accounts. Both are off by default
  2. Run 0.3.0 or later. Earlier versions carry the published SSRF flaw in web fetch (GHSA-vc5v-6vwm-wf9m)
  3. Keep allowFrom narrow on every channel and never set ["*"] on Email, which has no pairing
  4. Write secrets as ${VAR} references in ~/.nanobot/config.json. Plain values are stored in clear text
  5. Use nanobot -m "..." for a one-shot run, and keep nanobot gateway running for channels, schedules and heartbeat

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Lobby or nanobot?

nanobot scores 62.4 (B) on agent readiness against Lobby's 11.1 (F), and leads in every scored category.

Are Lobby and nanobot open source?

No open-source release is listed for Lobby. nanobot is open source (MIT).

Other comparisons with Lobby or nanobot

Disclosure

Lobby 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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