Droid vs Buzz
Buzz is the room. A droid is who you put in it.
Buzz is Block's open-source answer to what a workspace looks like when half the team isn't human. Channels, threads, repos, and a cryptographic identity for every agent so you can tell who did what. It gives agents somewhere to work rather than being one, which makes this less of a head-to-head than most pages here.
- A worker, not a workspace
- Voice, phone & video
- ~3,000 governed apps
- Nothing to build first
The honest short version.
Buzz is a free, Apache-2.0 collaboration platform built on Nostr, where humans and agents share channels, threads, DMs, voice, media, code repositories and workflows. Every agent gets its own keypair, so its identity is portable and verifiable rather than an account somebody granted it, and you can plug in agents built on Claude Code, Codex or Block's goose, or bring your own. That last part is the honest distinction. Buzz assumes you have agents. A droid is one you hire, already able to work your apps, answer a phone and hold a role, in the channels your team uses today.
Droid and Buzz, line by line.
The same job, two tools. Here's how they differ where it actually counts.
| Capability | Droid | Buzz |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | An AI worker you hire for a role, across chat, voice and the phone. | A workspace where humans and AI agents share channels, repos and workflows. |
| What you supply | The job. You brief it on a call and it gets going. | The agents. Buzz gives them somewhere to live, and you bring or build what runs in it. |
| Agent identity | Each droid is a member of your workspace with roles and scoped credentials. | A Nostr keypair per agent, so identity is portable and verifiable outside the platform. Genuinely novel. |
| Where it runs | Hosted for you, reachable in Slack, Teams, email, SMS and on a phone number. | Self-host it, or use Block's managed hosting at buzz.xyz. |
| Voice | Live calls on a real phone number, plus Zoom / Meet / Teams with screen-share. | Voice channels inside the workspace, in the way Slack or Discord have them. No telephony. |
| Acting on your tools | ~3,000 apps via managed OAuth, with read / write / destructive actions and per-tool policies. | Whatever the agents you bring can already do. Buzz is the surface, not the integration layer. |
| Code & repos | Writes and runs code, opens PRs against your existing repos. | Repositories are built in, with git integration that Block describes as still early. |
| Licensing | Commercial SaaS. The runtime underneath is MIT-licensed and public. | Apache-2.0, source at github.com/block/buzz. Inspect it, change it, run it. |
| Maturity | In production with paying teams. | A developer preview. Mobile clients unfinished, push notifications pending, some workflows incomplete. |
| Cost shape | Workspace credits shared across the team, hosting included. | Free to self-host. Managed hosting exists at buzz.xyz with no pricing published yet. |
Some of these rows go the other way, and they stay in. A comparison page where the competitor never wins is an advert, and readers can tell.
What a droid adds.
Buzz solves where agents work. These are the parts about what the agent can actually do.
It already knows how to work
A droid arrives able to run your apps, draft the email and file the record. Buzz expects you to bring something that can do that.
Governed access to your systems
Managed OAuth across ~3,000 apps with per-tool scopes and approval gates, which is the layer Buzz deliberately leaves to you.
Reaches beyond the workspace
Email, SMS, a phone number and video meetings, so customers and suppliers can reach it, not only people who joined your Buzz instance.
Nothing to stand up
No relay to run, no harness to wire in, no preview-stage rough edges to work around before it's useful.
Briefed out loud
You explain the job on a call. There's no agent to build or configure before the first run happens.
Credentials it never sees
Keys sit in a vault outside the model's reach and side-effecting actions wait for a person, without you designing that layer.
Where Buzz shines.
This is the most interesting product on this page, and it isn't really competing with a droid at all. Worth reading about on its own terms.
- Giving each agent a portable cryptographic identity is a genuinely good idea, and it means an agent's work can be attributed and verified without trusting the platform.
- Putting chat, repos and workflows in one place takes a clear position on how mixed human-and-agent teams will actually work.
- Apache-2.0 with the source published, so you can self-host the whole thing and nothing is hostage to a vendor.
- It's harness-agnostic, so Claude Code, Codex, goose or something you wrote all sit in the same room.
- It's free, and if you already have agents you want somewhere sensible to run them, there's very little reason not to try it.
The questions that come up most.
Not really. Buzz is a workspace and a droid is a worker, which are different layers of the same idea. It's on this page because people ask about both in the same breath, and the useful answer is that Buzz solves where your agents live while a droid solves having one at all.
Not today. A droid works in Slack, Teams, email, SMS and on the phone, and no Buzz integration exists. Buzz is only weeks old, so that may change, but as things stand the two don't connect.
Buzz is built on Nostr, so every agent has a keypair rather than an account the platform issued. That makes what an agent did attributable and verifiable independently of Buzz itself. It's a real idea and a good one, and it addresses a different problem from the one a droid solves, which is what an agent is permitted to touch in your business systems.
That's the question Buzz is actually asking, and it's worth taking seriously if your team is heading towards a lot of agents. It's a developer preview though, with mobile clients unfinished and some workflow paths incomplete, so it's worth trialling before moving anything that matters onto it.
No. Your conversations, files, and integration data aren't used to train shared models. Droid's providers operate under no-training, zero-retention terms for Droid traffic. See /security for the full posture.
Bring a worker, wherever the room is.
Starter credits, no card. Try one in the channels you already have, whatever you decide about where your agents should live.