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

Dots vs Town

Town scores 48.7 (D) on agent readiness against Dots's 28.3 (F), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Dots leads on schema & documentation. Both do proactive personal assistants.

Best AI personal assistants that act for one person · All 834 assistants comparisons

DotsOpenAI · Platform F28.3/100#980 of 1010 TownTown.com, Inc. · Platform D48.7/100#834 of 1010

Which one, for what

Dots F

Best for A ChatGPT Pro or Enterprise user who wants ongoing work tracked across mail, documents, code and Slack with approval before sends.

Ahead on

  • Schema & documentation, 41 against 33

Watch for

Beta. The admin setting is labelled Use dots (Beta), access is rolling out gradually, and Teams access is an invite-only alpha

Town D

Best for An owner who wants a mail and calendar assistant whose routines other systems can trigger.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 35 against 3
  • Agent ergonomics, 49 against 22
  • Security & auth, 79 against 58
  • Payments & pricing, 30 against 10
  • Maintenance & community, 60 against 38
  • Transparency & trust, 63 against 31

Also in its favour

  • Free to start without a card

Watch for

The privacy policy describes training with an opt-out and the trust page says training is opt-in.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runDotsTownEdge
Reliability16%20335Town +32
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.24133Dots +8
Agent ergonomics13%16.22249Town +27
Security & auth14%17.55879Town +21
Payments & pricing10%12.51030Town +20
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.83860Town +22
Transparency & trust7%8.83163Town +32
Negative events≤1500
TotalF 28.3/100D 48.7/100

Facts side by side

FactDotsTown
KindPlatformPlatform
VendorOpenAITown.com, Inc.
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
TransportsHTTP
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingPaidFreemium
x402nono
LicenceProprietary hosted service. The governing terms were not readClosed service under Town's Terms of Service (Town.com, Inc., updated 21 July 2026).
Read-only variant documentednoyes
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-10-092026-10-10
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

Verdicts

Dots

Actions that affect accounts or share information pass an automatic review, and custom rules can require approval or a hand-off. Dots is a beta on Pro plans from $100 a month, and no status page, terms, privacy policy or way to delete individual saved notes was found in the pages we could read.

Town

Town is a hosted assistant that works across the owner's mail, calendar and work apps, and other systems can start its routines through per-routine webhooks with rotatable secrets, idempotency keys and documented errors. A caller can't read a run's result. The privacy policy and trust page disagree on whether training is on by default.

Before you call either

Dots

  1. Say what may be sent. Asking a dot to draft replies does not permit sending them, and an action outside a stated scope needs another decision
  2. Stop three things separately. Pause stops the main task only, delegated tasks stop in Activity and recurring tasks in Scheduled, and completed actions are not undone
  3. Connect each thing separately. A messaging channel grants no access to an inbox, an app or a computer
  4. Sign out of websites and disconnect apps yourself when removing access. Revoking dots access or disconnecting an app does not delete information already obtained
  5. Keep the connected computer online with the ChatGPT app open for local work. Only one personal computer can be connected at a time

Town

  1. Start a Town routine with POST to its webhook URL, Authorization Bearer whsec_ secret, and application/json or text/plain. Expect 202 only.
  2. Send X-Town-Idempotency-Key with a stable event id on every retry so Town doesn't start a second run.
  3. Treat 404 as wrong secret, disabled endpoint or missing endpoint alike, and ask the owner to check Routine Settings rather than retrying.
  4. Send account_email only if the owner allowed the override. It must match a connected account in full and can't widen the routine's scope.
  5. Ask the owner to keep routines that act on webhook input in approval-required mode, as Town's own docs advise.

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Dots or Town?

Town scores 48.7 (D) on agent readiness against Dots's 28.3 (F), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Dots leads on schema & documentation.

Other comparisons with Dots or Town

Disclosure

Town 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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