CORE: review, pricing, security and alternatives

What CORE does

CORE belongs to the personal assistants family: general-purpose agents, often self-hosted and driven from a messaging app, that act for you on your files, accounts and services. On our grid it ranks #37 of the 46 projects of this family listed in the directory.

Who is CORE for?

It targets individuals and freelancers who want an assistant able to act for them day to day, often from a messaging app. Typical tasks people give it:

• sort e-mail and draft replies
• manage a calendar and reminders
• look up information and summarise it
• run small recurring tasks

It is a good candidate if you want the option of a local model, with no API fees.

Access and human control

Its documentation does not detail the access granted to the agent: check the settings before connecting it to your accounts.

We could not establish whether it asks for human approval before sensitive actions: test it first on an unimportant account or folder.

CORE pricing

The code is public but the repository declares no licence: reuse is not formally allowed. The real cost comes from model calls: each loop step sends the whole context back to the model, and a task of several dozen steps can cost far more than a single question. The LLM price calculator estimates it for the chosen model.

Getting started with CORE

1. Install it: the project ships as a Node.js package (install with npm, or run directly with npx). The exact command is in the repository README.
2. Pick the model: an API key from a provider, or a local model if your machine has enough graphics memory (the VRAM calculator tells you).
3. Give it a first playground with nothing at stake: a test folder, a secondary account or a throwaway project. Only open your real accounts once you have seen how it behaves.
4. Give it a short, checkable task, review the result and its action log, then raise the difficulty step by step.

Security: risk level

A personal assistant often combines access to private data, reading outside content and sending messages: the combination that enables data leaks through prompt injection.

Points found for CORE:

• No licence: legally shaky for company use.

Three habits: least privilege (minimal rights, dedicated keys), human approval for irreversible actions, a sandbox for code execution. The AI agent security check reviews your setup in a few minutes.

Project activity and releases

Created on May 27, 2025, the RedPlanetHQ/core repository has 2,002 stars, 195 forks and 180 open issues, with 1,214 commits in total. Last change 2 months ago.

Over the last 52 weeks: 980 commits, an average of 18.8 per week.

87 releases in total; 30 in the last twelve months. Latest release: 0.7.20, on September 7, 2026.

CORE vs other personal assistants

GitHub stars of the best-rated open-source projects in the personal assistants family. Stars measure attention, not quality: a heavily promoted project collects them fast, a specialised tool will have few.

CORE and other personal assistants at a glance

The 7 best-ranked agents in the same family, 7 of them open source. The score out of 100 only applies to open-source projects; for proprietary services we show the published entry price. A dash marks information the documentation does not state.

How we rated it

Score: 53/100, computed only from public, verifiable data, with no subjective testing or partnership:

• Adoption 16/40: 2,002 stars on a log scale (40 points from about 200,000).
• Activity 27/30: last commit 2 months ago, 30 releases in six months, 980 commits in a year.
• Framework 10/30: licence, default human approval, self-hosting, model choice and documentation site.

The score does not say whether the agent will succeed at your tasks: it measures how solid the project is. The full grid is on the method page.