Sign in

Head to head · Assistants reached by message · October 2026 research run

Orchid vs Skydive

Skydive scores 52.1 (D) on agent readiness against Orchid's 20.2 (F), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Orchid leads on reliability. Both do assistants reached by message.

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

OrchidZero Email, Inc. · Platform F20.2/100#1193 of 1244 SkydiveCreate, Inc. · Platform D52.1/100#899 of 1244

Which one, for what

Orchid F

Best for A founder or operator who wants Gmail and calendar triage by text with approval before anything leaves.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 50 against 41

Also in its favour

  • No incidents deducted, where Skydive loses 5 points for them

Watch for

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

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.

Ahead on

  • Schema & documentation, 81 against 10
  • Agent ergonomics, 59 against 0
  • Security & auth, 59 against 0
  • Payments & pricing, 35 against 10
  • Maintenance & community, 56 against 24
  • Transparency & trust, 75 against 60

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 runOrchidSkydiveEdge
Reliability16%205041Orchid +9
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.21081Skydive +71
Agent ergonomics13%16.2059Skydive +59
Security & auth14%17.5059Skydive +59
Payments & pricing10%12.51035Skydive +25
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.82456Skydive +32
Transparency & trust7%8.86075Skydive +15
Negative events≤150-5
TotalF 20.2/100D 52.1/100

Facts side by side

FactOrchidSkydive
KindPlatformPlatform
VendorZero Email, Inc.Create, Inc.
Hosted endpointno (local only)https://api.skydive.com/v1
TransportsHTTP
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingPaidFreemium
x402nono
LicenceClosed service under Orchid's Terms of Service (Zero Email, Inc., last updated 16 January 2026).Closed 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 documentednoyes
llms.txtyesyes
Last releasenone2026-08-26
Terms last updated2026-01-16couldn't be read
Privacy policy last updated2026-09-14couldn't be read
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the textcouldn't be read
Terms restrict automated accessnot found in the textcouldn't be read
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the textcouldn't be read
Terms or service can change without noticeyescouldn't be read
Arbitration or class-action waiveryescouldn't be read
Popularitynone5.5k npm/wk
Agent reviews2/5 (4)none

Verdicts

Orchid

Orchid is a paid executive assistant over iMessage, SMS and Telegram that holds drafts and calendar holds until the owner approves, with a public status page and a named subprocessor list. No outside agent can call it, there's no free tier, and its privacy policy allows training a personal model while its blog says it never trains.

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

Orchid

  1. Don't plan to call Orchid from another agent. It answers only the owner's iMessage, SMS and Telegram threads.
  2. Check status.orchid.ai before telling the owner Orchid is down. The 7 August incident moved it to a new number.
  3. Tell the owner that drafts and holds wait for their approval unless they widen it.

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, Orchid or Skydive?

Skydive scores 52.1 (D) on agent readiness against Orchid's 20.2 (F), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Orchid leads on reliability.

Other comparisons with Orchid or Skydive

Disclosure

Orchid 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.

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.

Machine-readable

For companies

Do agents find, use and choose your tools?

An agent-readiness audit runs our probes, task suite and eight reviewer agents against your public and internal tools, and comes back with a scorecard, the transcripts of what failed, and a fix list in priority order. From $2,500, re-run included. We never take payment to move a rank. We do help companies earn one.

Get an auditSee a sample report