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

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

chat-recall

Freemium

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

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.

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.

SmartAppsCo

Paid

A macOS workspace that runs Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode side by side, keeping parallel agent work, automations and secrets under your control.

Multi-CLI Agent Panes: Runs Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode side by side in tiled panes and terminals so several agents can be directed from one window.
Agent Handoff and Coordination: Agents pass scoped work between each other — one builds a command palette while another indexes the workspace — with each handoff visible to you.
Automations with Scheduling: Turns recurring jobs such as bug intake, feedback triage or weekly release notes into repeatable runs that follow the same steps every time.
Secret Management: API tokens and deploy credentials are stored in hob and injected at run time, so no agent or inference provider ever sees them.
Pull Request Workflow: Open, comment on and close pull requests in-app, with the diff, the conversation and the change all in one place, driven by hand or via the hob pr command.
Remote Issue Management: Connects to GitHub and Git hosts so issues can be triaged, filed and closed from the same surface the agents work in.
Local-First Architecture: The workspace and its database live on your own machine, with end-to-end encryption when you reach it from another device.
Durable Session History: Keeps a local record of runs and conversations that outlives the terminal session, so agent work can be reviewed or recovered later.

Supervising Parallel Agents: Direct several coding agents working on different parts of a feature at once without losing track of what each one changed.
Recurring Maintenance Automation: Schedule a weekly release-notes run or a daily user-feedback triage pass that executes identically every time.
Bug Intake Pipelines: Reproduce a reported issue, file it and summarize it as a single automated run triggered on demand.
Reviewing Agent Output Before Merge: Inspect the diff, conversation and resulting pull request together so generated changes get a real review instead of a blind merge.
Working Across Providers: Compare how Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode handle the same task using your existing subscriptions rather than resold tokens.
Remote Development: Leave agents running on a machine at the office and check in securely from another device over an encrypted connection.
Keeping Credentials Out of Prompts: Run agent tasks that need deploy tokens or API keys without ever exposing those secrets to the model.