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

nanobot vs Tomo

nanobot scores 62.4 (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

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 0
  • Agent ergonomics, 74 against 0
  • Security & auth, 63 against 0
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 10
  • Maintenance & community, 82 against 54

Also in its favour

  • No key needed to call it
  • Open source

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

Tomo F

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

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.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runnanobotTomoEdge
Reliability16%207015nanobot +55
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.2770nanobot +77
Agent ergonomics13%16.2740nanobot +74
Security & auth14%17.5630nanobot +63
Payments & pricing10%12.56010nanobot +50
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88254nanobot +28
Transparency & trust7%8.84847nanobot +1
Negative events≤15-60
TotalB 62.4/100F 13.1/100

Facts side by side

FactnanobotTomo
KindAgent harnessPlatform
VendorHKUDSMapo Labs, Inc.
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneOAuth or key
PricingFreePaid
x402nono
LicenceMITClosed service under Tomo's Terms of Service (Mapo Labs, Inc., last updated 24 September 2026).
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-09-152026-09-29
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
Popularity49k starsnone

Verdicts

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.

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

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

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, nanobot or Tomo?

nanobot scores 62.4 (B) on agent readiness against Tomo's 13.1 (F), and leads in every scored category.

Are nanobot and Tomo open source?

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

Other comparisons with nanobot 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

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