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

Poke vs Town

Town scores 48.7 (D) on agent readiness against Poke's 37.6 (F), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Poke leads on reliability and schema & documentation. Both do proactive personal assistants.

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

PokeThe Interaction Company of California Inc. · Platform F37.6/100#960 of 1010 TownTown.com, Inc. · Platform D48.7/100#834 of 1010

Which one, for what

Poke F

Best for One person who wants an assistant in their text messages that reads and drafts mail, manages a calendar and reaches other apps through MCP.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 51 against 35
  • Schema & documentation, 42 against 33

Watch for

No documented setting for which actions need approval before Poke sends, deletes or spends. Release notes mention email draft approval only in passing

Town D

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

Ahead on

  • Agent ergonomics, 49 against 30
  • Security & auth, 79 against 24
  • Maintenance & community, 60 against 31
  • Transparency & trust, 63 against 58

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 runPokeTownEdge
Reliability16%205135Poke +16
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.24233Poke +9
Agent ergonomics13%16.23049Town +19
Security & auth14%17.52479Town +55
Payments & pricing10%12.53030even
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.83160Town +29
Transparency & trust7%8.85863Town +5
Negative events≤1500
TotalF 37.6/100D 48.7/100

Facts side by side

FactPokeTown
KindPlatformPlatform
VendorThe Interaction Company of California Inc.Town.com, Inc.
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
TransportsHTTPHTTP
AuthAPI keyOAuth or key
PricingFreemiumFreemium
x402nono
LicenceProprietary service under Poke's Terms of Service. The poke npm package (CLI and Node.js SDK) declares MITClosed service under Town's Terms of Service (Town.com, Inc., updated 21 July 2026).
Read-only variant documentednoyes
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-06-252026-10-10
Terms last updated2026-03-17
Privacy policy last updated2026-09-11
Customer content may train modelsyes
Terms restrict automated accessyes
Terms restrict benchmarkingyes
Terms or service can change without noticeyes
Arbitration or class-action waiveryes

Verdicts

Poke

Hosted assistant that answers in Apple Messages, WhatsApp, Telegram and RCS and acts in Gmail, Outlook, calendars and MCP servers. Plan prices and a status page are public. No approval settings, credential storage, model providers or retention periods are documented, and customer content trains models unless Maximum Privacy is selected.

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

Poke

  1. POST JSON to https://poke.com/api/v1/inbound/api-message with a Bearer key from Kitchen. Legacy pk_ keys work only on the deprecated /api/v1/inbound-sms/webhook
  2. Expect only {"success": true} back. Poke's answer goes to the owner's message thread, not to the caller
  3. Do not retry a POST blindly. No idempotency key is documented, and a repeated message may make Poke act twice
  4. Treat an API key as full access to the owner's mail, calendar and integrations. Create one key per automation and revoke it when done
  5. Avoid the prefilled integration link with apiKey in the query string for real secrets. Enter the key in the form or use npx poke@latest mcp add -k

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, Poke or Town?

Town scores 48.7 (D) on agent readiness against Poke's 37.6 (F), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Poke leads on reliability and schema & documentation.

Other comparisons with Poke 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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