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
| Category | Weight this run | nanobot | Tomo | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 70 | 15 | nanobot +55 |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 77 | 0 | nanobot +77 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 74 | 0 | nanobot +74 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 63 | 0 | nanobot +63 |
| Payments & pricing | 10%12.5 | 60 | 10 | nanobot +50 |
| Task success | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7%8.8 | 82 | 54 | nanobot +28 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 48 | 47 | nanobot +1 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | -6 | 0 | |
| Total | B 62.4/100 | F 13.1/100 |
Facts side by side
| Fact | nanobot | Tomo |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Agent harness | Platform |
| Vendor | HKUDS | Mapo Labs, Inc. |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | no (local only) |
| Transports | ||
| Auth | None | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Free | Paid |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | MIT | Closed service under Tomo's Terms of Service (Mapo Labs, Inc., last updated 24 September 2026). |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | no |
| Last release | 2026-09-15 | 2026-09-29 |
| Terms last updated | no document linked | |
| Privacy policy last updated | no 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 | ||
| Popularity | 49k stars | none |
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
- Set
tools.restrictToWorkspaceto true andtools.exec.sandboxtobwraporseatbeltbefore giving it real accounts. Both are off by default - Run 0.3.0 or later. Earlier versions carry the published SSRF flaw in web fetch (GHSA-vc5v-6vwm-wf9m)
- Keep
allowFromnarrow on every channel and never set["*"]on Email, which has no pairing - Write secrets as
${VAR}references in~/.nanobot/config.json. Plain values are stored in clear text - Use
nanobot -m "..."for a one-shot run, and keepnanobot gatewayrunning for channels, schedules and heartbeat
Tomo
- 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.
- 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
- AstrBot vs nanobot
- CowAgent vs nanobot
- GAIA vs nanobot
- Gemini Spark vs nanobot
- Grok Bot vs nanobot
- Haven vs nanobot
- Hermes Agent vs nanobot
- Instinct vs nanobot
- IronClaw vs nanobot
- Leon vs nanobot
- Lindy vs nanobot
- nanobot vs NanoClaw
- nanobot vs Dots
- nanobot vs OpenClaw
- nanobot vs PicoClaw
- nanobot vs Poke
- nanobot vs QwenPaw
- nanobot vs ZeroClaw
- nanobot vs Zo Computer
- CowAgent vs Tomo
- GAIA vs Tomo
- Gemini Spark vs Tomo
- Grok Bot vs Tomo
- Haven vs Tomo
- Hermes Agent vs Tomo
- Instinct vs Tomo
- IronClaw vs Tomo
- Leon vs Tomo
- Lindy vs Tomo
- nanobot vs Natura tinyNature
- nanobot vs Pally
- nanobot vs Wajo (Fo)
- NanoClaw vs Tomo
- Natura tinyNature vs Tomo
- Dots vs Tomo
- OpenClaw vs Tomo
- Pally vs Tomo
- Poke vs Tomo
- QwenPaw vs Tomo
- Tomo vs Wajo (Fo)
- Tomo vs ZeroClaw
- Tomo vs Zo Computer
- nanobot vs Talorys
- Talorys vs Tomo
- AstrBot vs Tomo
- PicoClaw vs 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
- This page as Markdown
/compare/nanobot-vs-tomo.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/nanobot.json·/api/v1/tools/tomo.json - From a terminal
anchor compare nanobot tomo(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "nanobot", "b": "tomo"}at/mcp, no key