Droid vs Town
Town learns you. A droid works for everyone.
Town is built around one idea done properly: an assistant that picks up your voice, your people and your rhythms from the work itself, without a setup phase. It's yours, personally. A droid is the other shape, a worker the whole team shares, with a phone number, governed access to your business systems, and memory that carries between colleagues.
- One worker, whole team
- Voice, phone & video
- ~3,000 governed apps
- Customer-facing channels
The honest short version.
Town gives each person a "Townie" with its own address, reachable by email, Slack, WhatsApp and Telegram, and on web, iOS and Mac. It connects to 50-odd tools and comes with routines like morning briefings and contact research, and the thing it does best is learn how you specifically work rather than asking you to configure it. That personal focus is also where a droid diverges. A droid is hired by the team rather than the individual, so its memory is shared, it answers a number customers can dial, and it writes to your business systems under per-tool policies with approvals.
Droid and Town, line by line.
The same job, two tools. Here's how they differ where it actually counts.
| Capability | Droid | Town |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | An AI worker the team hires for a role, across chat, voice and the phone. | A personal AI assistant that learns how one person works and pitches in. |
| Who it belongs to | The workspace. Everyone @mentions the same droids and shares what they learn. | You. Each person gets their own Townie, tuned to them, which is the point of the product. |
| Where it lives | Slack, Teams, email, SMS, voice and a real phone number. | Its own @town.com address, plus Slack, WhatsApp and Telegram, on web, iOS and Mac. |
| Onboarding | Brief it on a call like a new hire, and correct it while it works. | It infers your voice, relationships and priorities from your existing work. Very little setup. |
| App integrations | ~3,000 apps via managed OAuth, with read / write / destructive actions and per-tool policies. | 50+ tools, focused on the inbox, calendar, docs and chat where personal work happens. |
| Proactive work | Durable scheduled and event-triggered runs, plus notifications when something's off. | Pre-built routines like morning briefings and newsletter digests, and it suggests its own. Comparable. |
| Voice, phone & video | Live voice calls, its own phone number, and it joins Zoom / Meet / Teams with screen-share. | Text-based. No telephony and no meeting attendance. |
| Customer contact | Answers the phone, follows up by SMS and email, and joins external calls. | Built for your own work rather than conversations with your customers. |
| Governance | Sensitive actions wait for approval, and credentials sit in a vault the model never sees. | A personal tool with personal-scope access, rather than a workspace governance layer. |
| Pricing shape | Workspace credits shared across the whole team. No per-seat charge. | Per person, with a 14-day free trial and no card up front. |
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.
Town is deliberately personal. These are the things that only appear once the work belongs to a team.
Shared memory
What one person teaches it is there for everyone else, so the knowledge doesn't leave when someone goes on holiday.
A number people can dial
Inbound and outbound calls, live voice and video with screen-share, and SMS follow-up afterwards.
Customers, not only colleagues
It can run the conversations that face outward, where a personal assistant is pointed at your own inbox.
Governed write access
Managed OAuth across ~3,000 apps with per-tool scopes, so it can update the CRM and the billing system, not only the inbox.
Approvals on side effects
Anything consequential waits for a person, and credentials live in a vault the model never sees.
Costs by work, not headcount
One shared credit pool for the whole workspace rather than a subscription for each person who needs one.
Where Town shines.
The learn-by-osmosis idea is a good one and Town executes it better than most. If what you want is a chief of staff for yourself, this is where to start.
- It picks up your tone and your relationships from real work, so drafts sound like you wrote them.
- Almost no setup. You don't write prompts or configure a persona before it's useful.
- Routines like morning briefings and contact research are genuinely useful from day one.
- It reaches you where you already are, including WhatsApp and Telegram.
- For personal coordination, recruiting pipelines and inbox triage, it's a strong fit.
The questions that come up most.
You could, and for personal productivity that might be exactly right. What that doesn't give you is one worker: ten Townies means ten separate memories, ten sets of learned context, and no single place the team's processes live. A droid is built the other way round, so the invoice run belongs to the workspace rather than to whoever set it up.
It does, and Town's approach is genuinely lighter for personal work. Briefing exists because a shared worker has to learn a process the way a team agrees it runs, rather than the way one person happens to do it. It's how you'd onboard a colleague, and it's a conversation rather than configuration.
If the job is your own inbox, calendar and follow-ups, Town is a strong choice. If the job belongs to a team, touches customers, needs a phone, or writes to systems where a mistake costs money, that's a droid.
Yes, and this is one where the two are genuinely comparable. Town has pre-built routines and suggests its own, and a droid has durable schedules and event triggers that fire on a new email or a webhook. What changes is where it goes next, since a droid's runs can take governed actions in your business systems rather than reporting back.
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.
When the job stops being just yours.
Starter credits, no card. Brief a droid on the process your whole team depends on, and let the memory sit with the workspace.