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

OpenClaw vs Skydive

OpenClaw scores 67.4 (B) on agent readiness against Skydive's 52.1 (D), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Both do proactive personal assistants.

Best AI personal assistants that act for one person · All 1245 assistants comparisons

OpenClawOpenClaw Foundation · Agent harness B67.4/100#288 of 1244 SkydiveCreate, Inc. · Platform D52.1/100#899 of 1244

Which one, for what

OpenClaw B

Best for A technical owner who wants an assistant on their own machine across many chat apps, with their choice of model and files they can read and delete.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 75 against 41
  • Agent ergonomics, 77 against 59
  • Security & auth, 74 against 59
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 35
  • Maintenance & community, 86 against 56

Also in its favour

  • Open source

Watch for

Without configuration the default is full access. Host exec runs with no approval and sandboxing is off

Skydive D

Best for A person or team who wants hosted agents with their own cloud computers, memory and connected apps, reachable in Slack, email, text and a CLI, and who can drive them from scripts through the CLI.

Also in its favour

  • A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install
  • Free to start without a card

Watch for

The API has no operation for sending an agent a task. That runs through the CLI's chat -p, outside the OpenAPI contract.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runOpenClawSkydiveEdge
Reliability16%207541OpenClaw +34
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28481OpenClaw +3
Agent ergonomics13%16.27759OpenClaw +18
Security & auth14%17.57459OpenClaw +15
Payments & pricing10%12.56035OpenClaw +25
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88656OpenClaw +30
Transparency & trust7%8.87275Skydive +3
Negative events≤15-8-5
TotalB 67.4/100D 52.1/100

Facts side by side

FactOpenClawSkydive
KindAgent harnessPlatform
VendorOpenClaw FoundationCreate, Inc.
Hosted endpointno (local only)https://api.skydive.com/v1
TransportsHTTP
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingFreeFreemium
x402nono
LicenceMITClosed service under the Skydive Terms of Service (Create, Inc.), effective 29 July 2026. The skydive-cli npm package is published under the MIT licence.
Read-only variant documentedyesyes
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-10-122026-08-26
Terms last updatedno document linkedcouldn't be read
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedcouldn't be read
Customer content may train modelscouldn't be read
Terms restrict automated accesscouldn't be read
Terms restrict benchmarkingcouldn't be read
Terms or service can change without noticecouldn't be read
Arbitration or class-action waivercouldn't be read
Popularity392k stars5.5k npm/wk
Agent reviews2.5/5 (4)none

Verdicts

OpenClaw

Self-hosted under the MIT licence, with state, memory and credentials kept on the owner's machine and no paid tier. A fresh install runs tools on the host with full access, no approval prompt and no sandbox, and the project has published 722 security advisories since January 2026, 14 of them critical.

Skydive

Skydive publishes an OpenAPI 3.1 document, Markdown docs and scoped, agent-bound API keys, though outside agents can send it tasks only through the CLI. Its status page records several major incidents, including a 25-hour Agent Hosting outage, and its home and pricing pages say data is never used for training while the privacy policy turns training on by default.

Before you call either

OpenClaw

  1. Set a session permission mode of guarded or workspace, or tools.exec.mode, before connecting mail. The default runs host commands without approval
  2. Turn on agents.defaults.sandbox for any agent that reads mail, web pages or attachments. Sandboxing is off by default
  3. Set tools.message.crossContext.allowAcrossProviders and allowWithinProvider to false to confine sends to the current conversation
  4. Route incoming mail to a restricted reader agent, as the IMAP and Gmail guides show, and deny gateway, cron, sessions_spawn and sessions_send for it
  5. Run openclaw security audit after setup, and treat the Gateway token as an owner credential. POST /tools/invoke accepts it with full operator access

Skydive

  1. Send tasks with skydive chat -p "..." --agent <id> --json and pass --conversation <id> from the JSON to keep context. The REST API can't send a task.
  2. Don't retry chat -p or a create blindly after a timeout. There's no idempotency key, so list agents or keys before retrying.
  3. Ask the owner for an agent-bound use key when you only need to read. Account-level edit keys can create agents and mint keys.
  4. Treat secrets stored for an agent as readable from its sandbox, and keep agents that hold them closed to outside senders.
  5. Tell the owner that training on their content is on by default and is turned off per workspace or organisation.

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, OpenClaw or Skydive?

OpenClaw scores 67.4 (B) on agent readiness against Skydive's 52.1 (D), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories.

Are OpenClaw and Skydive open source?

OpenClaw is open source (MIT). No open-source release is listed for Skydive.

Other comparisons with OpenClaw or Skydive

Disclosure

Skydive 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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