Town vs Cabinet: your assistant, or your company's brain
Town gives each person a Townie: a personal AI assistant with its own town.com email address that triages your inbox, preps your meetings, and drafts replies across 50+ tools. Cabinet gives the whole company one knowledge base it owns, where AI agents research, write, and keep live dashboards current. Hire Town to clear an inbox. Hire Cabinet to build a brain the company keeps.
Last reviewed August 2026 against public pricing and docs.
Choose Cabinet if
- You want company knowledge your team can open, edit, and audit as files it owns.
- You want agent work that lands as durable documents and live dashboards, not actions that scatter across inboxes.
- Self-hosting, open source, and paying providers directly for AI are requirements.
Stick with Town if
- Your bottleneck is personal busywork: email triage, scheduling, meeting prep.
- You want a polished assistant that lives in Gmail, Outlook, Slack, and WhatsApp with zero setup.
Open source · self-hosted · bring your own AI
The core difference
Town remembers you. Cabinet is what your company remembers.
Town is a genuinely good personal assistant. Your Townie gets its own email address, learns your voice and priorities, triages the inbox, preps meetings, and runs background routines. Its homepage says it plainly: Townies keep a wiki on how you work. Email stays draft-only by design, and autonomy is earned one workflow at a time. That trust model is the right one, and it is close to how Cabinet dispatches agents.
Here is the catch. That wiki about how you work lives in Town's cloud. You cannot open it as files, edit it, move it, or point your own tools at it, and Town publishes no export for it as of August 2026. The work itself lands as sent drafts and calendar changes inside your SaaS accounts. Helpful today, invisible next quarter. When a person leaves or a subscription lapses, everything the assistant learned goes with it.
Cabinet inverts that. The knowledge base is the product: files your company holds on its own infrastructure, agents that read and write them on schedules, and live dashboards rendered from what they know. The longer your team works, the more the brain is worth, and it is yours whether or not you renew anything.
Where Cabinet wins
Three things Town cannot do
The memory is yours to open
Town's memory is a wiki about you that Town keeps. Cabinet is the wiki your company keeps: every brief, decision, and customer note is a document you can open, correct, and hand to the next hire.
brain/
customers/
acme-renewal.md
meetings/
2026-08-12-board-prep.md
Work that lands, and stays
A Townie's output disappears into inboxes and calendars. Cabinet agents leave behind briefs, trackers, and dashboards rendered live from the knowledge base, so Tuesday's research still answers questions in December.
Your models, at provider prices
Town meters credits: $15 buys about 1,250 a month, $199 buys 40,000, overage on top, as of August 2026. Cabinet routes to the AI accounts you already pay for, so the AI bill is the provider's price and nothing more.
Feature by feature
Cabinet vs Town, side by side
The features that actually decide this, including the ones where Town comes out ahead.
| Feature | Cabinet | Town |
|---|---|---|
| A company knowledge base you own as files | Included | Not included |
| Assistant memory you can open, edit, and exportTown's wiki on how you work lives in Town's cloud; no export is published as of August 2026. | Included | Not included |
| Personal inbox and calendar triage | Not included | Included |
| Assistant on WhatsApp and Telegram | Not included | Included |
| AI agents with schedules and routines | Included | Included |
| You approve before agents actTown offers read-only, approval, and autonomous modes; email stays draft-only. | Included | Included |
| Work persists as documents and dashboards | Included | Not included |
| Live apps rendered from your knowledge | Included | Not included |
| Bring your own AI model keysTown publishes no bring-your-own-model option as of August 2026. | Included | Not included |
| Self-hosted on your infrastructure | Included | Not included |
| Open source | Included | Not included |
| Built for teamsTown's Team and Business plans pool credits and share routines; each person still runs an individual assistant. | Included | Partial |
| A free tier you can actually work inTown's free plan is 30 chats per month as of August 2026. | Included | Partial |
Being honest
When Town is the better choice
- Your problem is personal busywork. For inbox triage, scheduling, and meeting prep across Gmail, Outlook, Slack, and WhatsApp, a Townie is excellent.
- You want an assistant with its own email address that colleagues can CC, working in minutes with nothing to host.
- You are buying for one person, not building a shared knowledge base, and per-seat credits are acceptable.
Questions
Cabinet vs Town, answered
What is Town AI and what does a Townie do?
Town is a personal AI assistant startup that raised $73M, including a $55M Series A led by a16z in June 2026. Each user gets a Townie: a named assistant with its own town.com email address that triages email, preps meetings, drafts replies in your voice, and runs routines across 50+ integrations. It runs in Town's cloud only.
How much does Town cost?
As of August 2026, Town's published plans are Free (30 chats per month), Starter at $15, Pro at $49, Power at $99, and Power Plus at $199 per month, each with a monthly credit allowance from about 1,250 up to 40,000, plus Team and Business plans with pooled credits. Cabinet is open source and free to self-host, with AI billed through your own provider keys.
Is Cabinet a Town alternative?
They solve different problems. Town is a personal assistant for your inbox and calendar. Cabinet is a knowledge workspace your company owns, where teams and AI agents build knowledge that persists as files and live dashboards. Some teams run both: a Townie for personal triage, Cabinet as the company brain.
Can I self-host Town or bring my own AI model?
No. Town runs only in Town's cloud, is closed source, and publishes no bring-your-own-model option as of August 2026. Cabinet self-hosts on your infrastructure and routes to the AI provider accounts you already pay for.
Does Town work for teams?
Town sells Team and Business plans with shared workspaces, pooled credits, and shared routines. The model remains one personal assistant per person. Cabinet starts from the other end: one shared knowledge base the whole company and its agents work in together.
Can I export what Town learns about me?
Town markets a wiki on how you work, but it lives inside Town's product and no export is published as of August 2026. In Cabinet, everything agents learn and produce is a file your company holds and can move anywhere.
Sources
Where these facts come from
Claims on this page are checked against public sources, last reviewed August 2026. Spotted something out of date? Tell us at hi@runcabinet.com and we will fix it.
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