Pally vs Town (2026)

Pally connects to Gmail, Outlook and iCloud mail, Google and iCloud calendars, WhatsApp through Linked Devices, iMessage through its Mac app, Slack, Google Drive, Docs and Sheets, Notion, Linear, GitHub, Jira, Todoist, Granola and X, with app authorization handled by Composio and room for custom integrations.

It acts in them, sending WhatsApp and iMessage messages and email, forwarding mail, creating calendar invites and editing a Google Doc in place once the user approves. Sites without an integration are reached through browser errands that sign in with saved logins, and a bank account can be linked read only for recurring charges.

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Read and write integrations reach Google, Microsoft and more than fifty business tools, including Gmail (read, search, draft, send, label), Google Calendar (create meetings with Meet links, edit events), Docs, Drive, Sheets, Outlook and Microsoft 365 mail and calendar, Slack (bot and send-as-user), and read-write connectors across CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot, Attio, Pipedrive, Copper, Affinity), project tools (Asana, Jira, Linear, ClickUp, Monday.com, Notion, Todoist), finance (QuickBooks Online and Xero create invoices, Brex, Ramp, Stripe), data (Airtable, Supabase, PostHog, Google Analytics, Hex) and meetings (Zoom, Fathom, Fireflies, Granola, Gong).

Microsoft Entra has its own admin setup. Connectors are native plus Pipedream-backed, actions create, update and send, and OAuth tokens are stored, refreshed automatically and revocable per account. WhatsApp and Telegram are inbound-only. Custom MCP servers can be added too.

Sourcetown.com home; town.com/docs, /docs/safety/security; readread 2026-09-16

Background tasks carry an errand across messages, email, the browser and calls, retry after a brief model error and pick up new choices from the chat while they run. Automations are written in a sentence and can carry conditions, such as nudging a friend who still owes money once three days pass. Through the trusted network, a user's Pally hands parts of a job to the Pallys of a partner, friends or colleagues, each acting under its own owner's sharing choices, and in a group chat each member's request runs on that member's own Pally and accounts.

Sourcepally.com/trusted-networkread 2026-10-12

Routines can call other routines and mix deterministic code steps with AI steps. A routine can call another routine mid run, in which case the caller pauses until the called routine returns its result, and a parent must list the child in its Callable Routines setting before invoke_routine can call it.

AI steps handle writing, summarizing, deciding and analyzing, while deterministic steps handle filtering, formatting, aggregating and iterating over a list, as in a four step example that gathers and organizes with code, writes with AI and sends with code. Users describe a routine in plain language, set it on a trigger or schedule, and share routines across a team. Town does not describe routine versioning.

Sourcetown.com/docs/routines/custom-routines/concepts/calling-agents, /docs; readread 2026-09-16

Automations fire the moment something happens, such as an email from a landlord, or on a schedule, and email triggered rules read new Outlook and Gmail messages as they arrive. Morning briefs, alerts on important messages across every connected account, flight day changes and price drop or restock watches arrive unprompted. People reach Pally by text, voice note or a call to its number, and in an iMessage or Telegram group it answers when someone names it or replies to one of its messages.

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Each routine can have one or more triggers and runs whenever any fires, whether that is incoming email, which runs it every time a new email arrives, a smart email trigger that judges a plain language condition with sender and subject filters, outgoing email, email to the assistant, a schedule or a manual run, with meeting start (calendar) triggers on Pro and above.

Triggers can be event driven, scheduled or conversational, several can feed one routine, and the smart trigger still runs if its condition cannot be judged. The Townie is reachable by email, Slack, text messaging, WhatsApp and Telegram (inbound-only), the web app, iOS and macOS. Event and calendar triggers need Pro or a paid team plan, and Starter is schedule only, at most once a day. An authenticated webhook endpoint can also start a routine.

Sourcetown.com/docs/routines/custom-routines/triggers, /docs/billing/plans; readread 2026-09-16

Connected mail, calendars, chats, Drive files and Notion pages are read when a question needs them, and web research runs through Exa. From each connected inbox Pally also keeps structured records of receipts, order confirmations and renewal notices from about the past 12 months, with merchant, items, amount, date and repeat cycle, alongside recurring charges from a linked bank account. Outside those purchase records, documents are read at request time instead of being indexed into a lasting knowledge store.

Sourcepally.com/privacyread 2026-10-12

The Townie, Town's assistant, is grounded in the user's connected email, calendar, chats, contacts and tools, queried at run time rather than indexed.

Every integration added, such as Slack, Notion, Drive, Linear or GitHub, becomes another source of context, and the integrations offer search and read tools (Gmail search, Drive search and read, Box files and metadata, Notion pages and databases, Granola and Fireflies transcripts).

Access to connected sources follows each account's permissions and the routine's account scope, and new knowledge comes from connecting a source, not from retraining. No index or search layer over connected content persists between runs. The Wiki and memories summarize the user rather than index their content.

Sourcetown.com/docs/features/context-and-memory, /docs integration directory; readread 2026-09-16

Memory is built around people, not files, covering who the user talks to, what they last discussed and what was promised, such as a friend's dietary needs or a deck owed to an investor. Pally tidies it every night, and the user can ask what it remembers, edit it, tell it to forget something, which then stays out after the nightly update, download it or delete the account. Memory is held per user, a group chat's history and memory belong to the group, and both are kept while the account is active.

Sourcepally.com/privacyread 2026-10-12

The Townie remembers who the user is, their preferences, and notes on contacts and people. Memories are either global, applying to everything across all routines, or specific to one routine, and a run automatically receives all global memories plus those for that routine. Memory carries over between Slack, email, the app and the Mac app, and users view and delete memories in Settings > Profile or by asking, for example to forget a preference about Friday afternoons, and can add, change or remove anything.

A Wiki synthesizing profile, preferences, goals and projects is refreshed every night, retiring what is stale, and is editable line by line, with Recent Updates showing what changed. Memories last until the user removes them, with nightly retirement of stale entries, and can be deleted without deleting any email, event or document. Town does not say what should stay out of long term memory.

Sourcetown.com/docs/features/context-and-memory, /docs/features/wiki; readread 2026-09-16

Pally checks with the user before it spends or sends anything not already asked for or approved, and sends on its own only within limits the user sets, such as messages to a named group. A purchase lays out the exact items, seats, fees and total for a single approval, stops if any of them change, and follows the wallet's own approval settings.

Drafts appear before they go and expire after seven days unapproved, approvals can be given by voice during a call, approvals in group chats happen privately in each person's own thread, and the user can take over a live browser session and hand it back.

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Approval modes are configurable at the routine, tool and session level. Every routine has a default mode, which is autonomous, approval required or read only, and in approval required mode, actions that make changes create approval requests with approve or reject options and run only after the user approves them. Per-tool permission levels override the routine mode (Auto, Ask each time, Always allow), so labeling can run autonomously while email sending always waits.

Chat sessions run "Ask before any changes" by default, "Always allow safe actions" or "Allow all actions", with Allow once and Always allow per approval. Town also flags routines that combine private data, untrusted input and external sending (a lethal-trifecta warning) when they are saved, and keeps external-send tools on approval under safe mode. Low-risk and high-risk actions can run under different autonomy modes, and the warning explains why a checkpoint fired. Approvals arrive in the app and through notifications, with no routing into ticketing systems.

Sourcetown.com/docs/safety/modes-approvals, /docs/safety/security; readread 2026-09-16

Each person in the trusted network picks, one capability at a time, what their Pally may share with each circle, starting from just a name and contact card, and in a group chat a personal request never runs on another member's accounts. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest with access limited inside the company, website logins sit in an encrypted vault run by Kernel that Pally itself never sees, and content arriving from outside is treated as information, never as instructions. Pally holds no SOC 2 or ISO certification and offers no team administration or single sign on.

Sourcepally.com/trusted-networkread 2026-10-12

Town is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, with its security controls independently audited, and it links to a Security Portal and a Subprocessors list. Routines operate within strict account boundaries with configurable scope (the trigger account only by default, all accounts, or specific accounts), tools can only reach accounts connected through OAuth with revocable access, and optional domain allowlists and recipient limits apply to email.

Prompt validation blocks instruction-override and exfiltration patterns, and lethal-trifecta detection flags routines that combine private data, untrusted input and external sending. Data is not used to train AI models unless the user opts in, and is encrypted in transit and at rest. People sign in with Google or Microsoft accounts, including Microsoft Entra ID, and Teams plans add domain capture.

An Entra admin can grant consent for the whole tenant and then either let every user in the tenant sign in or restrict access to chosen users and security groups, and Google Workspace has its own admin guide. Town does not mention SAML single sign on or SCIM provisioning for team admins. SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2 reports, the latest penetration test and a CASA Tier 2 assessment are available under NDA through trust.town.com.

Traffic uses TLS 1.2 or 1.3, data at rest uses AES 256 GCM with extra encryption on connected account tokens, Enterprise agreements can enforce no training for every user, and no Town team member has production database access.

SourceTown, town.com/docs/admin-setup/microsoft-entra, /docs/safety/security and town.com/trustread 2026-10-05

Browser errands run with a live view and screenshots the user can watch, paused while a card number is entered, and a stopped session comes back with an accurate account of what happened. Users can ask what changed in their automations, rules and saved preferences, group automations show their latest real results, and recalled activity appears in the user's own time zone. A log of every step and tool call behind a task, ready for export or review, is not part of the product.

Sourcepally.com/changelog.mdread 2026-10-12

Each action is logged with what was done, when, why (the routine's reasoning), what triggered it and the result, success or failure, for auditability, debugging and accountability. Users open a routine, view the session history, and review actions taken and their reasoning. A separate security event log records blocked prompt injections, suspicious prompts, blocked tool outputs and unauthorized recipients, and custom tool results show up in the run history. There is no export to monitoring or SIEM tools, and no retention period by plan is given.

Sourcetown.com/docs/safety/security, /docs/integrations/mcp-servers; readread 2026-09-16

Everything runs on AWS in the US, with iMessage, RCS, phone and email delivery through US providers and Telegram traffic passing through the UAE. Cloud Mac instances are dedicated macOS machines on AWS in the US. A user cannot choose a region, and there is no private deployment or self hosting.

Sourcepally.com/subprocessorsread 2026-10-12

Town hosts the service in the US on Convex and AWS. There is no region choice, self hosting or customer environment option, and the Teams and Enterprise plans cover billing and credits, not deployment.

Sourcetown.com home; town.com/docs/billing/plans; readread 2026-09-16

Ready made recipes start from one message and each does a whole job. They include Inbox triaged, Morning brief, The friendly nag, WhatsApp and iMessage catch up, Flight finder, Flight day, Price drop and restock watch, Buy it for me, Pre meeting briefs, A memory for your people, Receipt keeper, Your Mac from anywhere, Call Pally and Quote hunter. A machine readable catalog lists every guide and recipe entry point with its opening message.

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Ready made routines sit in a browsable catalog, each a complete job a user enables.

The catalog filters by Inbox, Calendar, Meeting Prep, Stay Informed and Relationships, with a Browse all Routines view, and its entries include Auto-inbox (watches new email, labels, drafts replies, helps schedule), Decline Cold Outreach, Schedule Optimizer, Meeting Briefing, Contact Research Dossier, Morning Briefing, Competitive Intel Briefing, Newsletter Digest, GitHub Reports, Relationship Reconnect, Deal Spotter and New User Research.

A Stock Routines index has per-routine pages, and routine sharing and discovery let teams install and reuse shared routines. Each routine runs whole without the others, and routines are edited in plain language ("change my morning briefing to include..."). The routines cover personal productivity rather than specific industries, and no customer references are tied to them.

Sourcetown.com home; town.com/docs; readread 2026-09-16

Pally picks the model for each turn. Most turns route through OpenRouter to hosts that do not train on user data, running Google Gemini, OpenAI and Anthropic Claude models, with open weight models served by Phala, Novita, Together AI, Modal and Baseten for some steps, and OpenAI also handles phone calls, transcription and memory search. A user cannot choose the model, and routines that pass the usage limit keep running on a lighter one.

Sourcepally.com/subprocessorsread 2026-10-12

Town routes between models on its side, names no models and offers no choice. Priority model routing is a feature of the Power, Power Plus and Team Plus plans and is among what pauses on cancellation. No model or provider is named and customers cannot choose one, and the models in the Cursor integration are Cursor's. Town's no training commitment covers its providers without naming them.

Sourcetown.com/pricing; readread 2026-09-16

Pally runs its own MCP server over streamable HTTP, secured with OAuth 2.1, dynamic client registration and PKCE, and it connects from Claude, ChatGPT in developer mode and Cursor once the user sends a single use code in the Pally chat. It exposes two tools, message_pally to send a message and get the reply and check_pally to collect the result of a long job, under the same approval rules as the chat. There is no public API or SDK for managing tasks, automations, memory or connections directly.

Sourcepally.com/mcpread 2026-10-12

Outside systems can reach Town in two ways, but Town has no REST API, SDK or MCP server of its own.

Through a webhook trigger, an external system starts a routine by sending an authenticated HTTP request to a routine specific URL, with a per routine bearer secret and rotation, JSON or text payloads, an idempotency header, rate limits and defined 202, 400, 404, 413, 415 and 429 responses, from Zapier or the customer's own app or backend.

Through custom integrations, users add MCP servers by URL, Town runs OAuth or dynamic client registration, and the tools are enabled per routine, so Town consumes MCP as a client. A trigger endpoint returns only an acceptance. The api.town.com host shows only the Convex backend banner, with no developer documentation.

Sourcetown.com/docs/routines/stock-routines/webhooks, /docs/integrations/mcp-servers; api.town.com; readread 2026-09-16

An automation starts work as soon as it is written, with no test run, quality check or side by side comparison beforehand. Pally reports changes to a user's setup once and explains them on request, which keeps configuration visible without measuring how well the assistant performed.

Sourcepally.com/changelog.mdread 2026-10-12

A new or changed routine can be tried against real input, with its attempted actions reviewable, before it is allowed to act. Read only mode runs a routine that can read and analyze but blocks every change, and Town suggests it for testing new configurations, as it does the manual trigger for testing new routines. Each run's session history shows the actions the routine took and its reasoning, and read only runs still send their results to the user.

Reviewing a read only run before switching the routine to approval required or autonomous shows how the agent behaves before release. When a smart email trigger cannot judge its condition, the routine runs anyway. There are no fixtures or datasets, scored test cases or quality scores over time, and testing uses a mode rather than a dedicated harness.

Sourcetown.com/docs/safety/modes-approvals, /docs/routines/custom-routines/triggers; readread 2026-09-16

Browser errands run in a hosted browser on Kernel that signs in with saved logins or Google, reads one time codes from email or messages, fills checkout forms, takes seat holds and completes orders on sites such as Amazon and Instacart, stopping to tell the user what a site needs when it gets stuck. The user can watch the live view, take control and hand the session back. The Pally Mac app lets Pally see the user's own Mac screen, find a file and run the next step, and Cloud Mac, sold separately, gives it a dedicated macOS machine in the cloud.

Sourcepally.com/airead 2026-10-12

Town has no browser, desktop or computer control. Actions run through named integrations with read-write tools, a run_code sandbox with optional internet access, and email, Slack and messaging channels. Town Desktop is a macOS app for native desktop workflows and notifications, a way to reach the assistant rather than an agent that operates the screen.

Sourcetown.com/docs, /docs/safety/security; town.com home; readread 2026-09-16