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chat-recall vs Harden: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)

A side-by-side comparison of chat-recall and Harden — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.

chat-recall logo

chat-recall

chat-recall

Freemium

Makes every conversation your team has had with AI coding assistants searchable, and flags secrets leaked into those chats.

Key features

  • Unified Conversation Search: Full-text search across the chats, plans, task lists and notes written by five supported AI coding tools, searchable the moment they arrive.
  • Local Secret Redaction: Passwords and API keys are stripped on your own computer before anything is uploaded; only the last few characters are ever received.
  • Leaked Key Reporting: Shows every key found, whether it is still live, and how many conversations it appeared in, with support for custom in-house key formats you register.
  • MCP Server and Recall Tools: Exposes the history to your assistants through an MCP server so they can query past work directly rather than starting cold.
  • Ranked Action Plan: Derives code findings and a prioritized list of what to fix next, written out as CODE_TASKS.md.
  • Self-Closing Bug Tasks: Each detected bug becomes a task with a sketched fix, and closes itself once the problem is actually gone.
  • Config Distribution: Skills and MCP configuration follow you to every machine and to whichever assistant you pick up next, with a per-machine view of what is missing.
  • Per-Project Rules: Mark a project as a prototype or a live product once, and every assistant that opens it plays by the matching rules.

Best for

  • Credential Incident Response: Find which keys were pasted into assistant conversations, whether they are still valid, and where they spread.
  • Recovering Past Decisions: Search months of AI conversations to recover a plan or rationale instead of asking the same question again.
  • Onboarding a New Machine: Sign in on a new laptop and get the full conversation history and every accumulated skill without copying files by hand.
  • Switching Assistants: Try a different AI coding tool without losing the add-ons and context built up in the previous one.
  • Team Knowledge Sharing: Share project history selectively with teammates and assign follow-up work from a shared task board.
  • Security Review Before Shipping: Run the secret monitor and code findings over accumulated history as a pre-release check.
View chat-recall details
Harden logo

Harden

Harden

Free

Local security layer for AI coding agents that inspects every tool call before it runs and can block, rewrite, or pause the action.

Key features

  • Pre-Execution Tool Call Checking: Every command, file edit, tool call, and outbound request is evaluated before it is allowed to run, not audited afterwards.
  • Intent-Aware Decisions: The check compares the proposed action against the task the developer actually requested plus session context, rather than matching a static rule list.
  • On-Device Model: A post-trained 8B-parameter model runs locally and is reported to beat frontier models on agent-security benchmarks while remaining fast enough to sit inline.
  • Graduated Responses: Actions can be allowed, blocked, redacted, paused for a human answer, or simply logged, and a blocked action does not stop the agent's other work.
  • Secret and Exfiltration Protection: Catches credential leaks, data exfiltration attempts, and destructive infrastructure operations before they execute.
  • Local Review Dashboard: Every decision is logged and reviewable through a dashboard that runs on the developer's own machine.
  • Broad Agent Compatibility: Works with Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Hermes, OpenClaw, Kiro, and Antigravity.
  • Privacy by Design: Repository contents and tool output stay on the local machine because inference happens there.

Best for

  • Guarding Autonomous Coding Sessions: Let a coding agent run with fewer manual approvals while a local check still catches destructive commands.
  • Preventing Secret Leakage: Stop an agent from pasting API keys or credentials into an outbound request or a committed file.
  • Blocking Prompt-Injection Damage: Catch actions an agent was steered into by malicious content in a repository, issue, or web page it read.
  • Protecting Production Infrastructure: Intercept destructive infrastructure operations before they reach cloud resources or databases.
  • Agent Behaviour Auditing: Review a logged trail of what an agent tried to do and which actions were blocked or redacted.
  • Team Policy Enforcement: Apply consistent guardrails across developers using different coding agents on the same codebase.
View Harden details