Carly vs Town: Which AI Assistant Should You Hire?
Town gives every person on your team a “Townie,” an AI assistant with its own @town.com address that learns from your email, calendar and documents. It became a $1 billion company on October 19, per TechCrunch, four months after launching.
Carly is an AI assistant for your email, calendar, phone and texts, plus the agents you build to run your business. It follows the rules you write, the same way every time.
The quick answer: pick Carly if your business runs on phone calls, texts and more than a few inboxes, or if you want to know what you’ll pay. Town has no phone line, caps email accounts by plan and bills in credits that expire monthly. Free Zapier-style workflows; AI agents from $35/month.
Carly vs Town at a glance
| Carly | Town | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | Email, calendar, calls, texts and business workflows | One assistant per person that learns your work |
| Answers your business line | Yes, 24/7, English or Spanish | No |
| Calls and texts customers | Yes | No phone line |
| Calls you with your day | Yes, on the schedule you set | No |
| Email accounts | Every Gmail and Outlook account you connect | 2, 5, 10 or unlimited, by plan |
| What starts work | An email, a call, a booking, a form, a CRM change or a time | Daily schedule on Starter; live triggers from Pro |
| Who it answers | Full, Standard, Limited or Blocked, per contact | Access rules on team plans |
| Separate agents per job | Yes, each with its own email address | One Townie per person |
| Where you use it | Web, text, phone, email, ChatGPT, Claude | App, email, Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram |
| Billing | Free Zapier-style workflows; AI agents from $35/month | Credits that expire monthly; $15 to $239 per person |
Town details from its pricing page and billing docs, read October 22, 2026.
Phones and texts are where Town stops
Most small businesses still run on the phone. A plumber’s next job, a buyer’s showing and a patient’s reschedule all arrive as calls and texts. Town’s plans cover chat, email, Slack, WhatsApp and Telegram, and that’s the list.
Carly picks up:
- It answers your business line around the clock, or only the calls you miss, in English or Spanish.
- It knows who’s calling. Each caller is looked up in your CRM, and people you know are greeted by name.
- It calls new leads within a minute of a form fill, and texts and emails if they don’t answer.
- It texts back every missed call from your number.
- It calls you. “Call me every weekday at 8am with my day” and your phone rings at 8am.
- Your team calls it. A teammate who rings your Carly number from their own phone gets their own Carly: “Hi Josh, what can I do?”
Setup is one prompt pasted into ChatGPT or Claude, and you grab a number in the chat. Get started.
Rules you write vs a Townie that learns
Town’s pitch is that the Townie figures out your clients, voice and priorities from what’s already in your accounts. That’s appealing until you need it to do the same thing on the 500th email as on the first.
Carly works from rules in plain English. “Label every invoice from a vendor, save the PDF to Drive and add it to the bills sheet.” “If a client emails after 6pm, reply that Emily will answer in the morning.” It does that exactly, every time. Write a rule and watch it run.
The other cost of learning on its own: Town’s credits docs call a routine that runs on every incoming email “the heaviest setup there is.” An inbox assistant that’s expensive to run on every email is a strange thing to pay for.
Every inbox, not five
Town counts email accounts by plan: two on Starter, five on Pro at $59 a month, ten on Power at $119. Plenty of owners have a personal Gmail, a business Workspace account and an Outlook account from a second company before lunch.
Carly connects every Gmail and Outlook account you have and every calendar behind them. It checks all of them before it books anything, and sends each reply from the right address.
Who your assistant is allowed to answer
An assistant that reads your email will get messages from strangers, and some of those will try to talk it into things. Carly gives you the controls:
- A level for every contact. Full, Standard, Limited or Blocked decides what each person can use your agents for. Blocked people are never answered, on any channel.
- New people can wait. Choose whether Carly answers someone new or waits for you to say yes.
- Drafts for approval. Set an agent to draft every reply for a teammate to send, or to send on its own.
- It steps back. When a teammate replies on a thread, the agent stops.
- Calls are checked. Carly acts for a known caller only when the phone carrier confirms the number is real.
Credits vs a price you can plan around
Town bills its work in credits and doesn’t say what a task costs in them. Credits expire every month, there are no top-ups, overage on Pro runs about four times the included rate, and Town doesn’t give refunds. The full breakdown is in Town AI pricing.
Carly’s Zapier-style workflows are free, so filing, labeling, tagging and alerting cost you nothing. AI agents start at $35 a month. See what Carly can do.
Where Town is strong
Town’s meeting recording works well on mobile, its briefings are polished and its integrations list is wide. If you want one personal assistant that absorbs context and you never need it on the phone, it does that.
Which should you choose?
- Your customers call and text you: Carly
- You have more than a few inboxes: Carly
- You want work to start the moment an email, call or form arrives, on the cheapest plan: Carly workflows
- You want separate agents for scheduling, leads and invoices: Carly agents
- You want to control who your assistant answers: Carly
- You want one learning assistant per person and live in Slack and email only: Town
For the rest of the field, see Town alternatives.
FAQ
Is Carly cheaper than Town?
Usually. Carly’s Zapier-style workflows are free and AI agents start at $35 a month. Town’s live email triggers start at $59 a month per person, billed in credits that expire monthly.
Can Town answer phone calls?
No. Town’s plans don’t include a phone line. Carly answers your business line, calls leads back and texts customers.
How many email accounts can Town connect?
Two on Starter, five on Pro, ten on Power and unlimited on Power Plus at $239 a month. Carly connects every account you have.
Can I move from Town to Carly?
Yes. Connect your Gmail and Outlook accounts to Carly, describe the routines you ran in Town in plain English, and Carly runs them as workflows.
Does Carly work for a whole team?
Yes. Each teammate gets their own Carly on the team line, and agents handle shared jobs like scheduling and lead follow-up. Book a call if you want help setting it up.
Ready to automate your busywork?
Carly schedules, researches, and briefs you—so you can focus on what matters.
See what people say
"Before Carly, I relied on a Calendly link, but the whole process felt impersonal and not very professional. Carly changed that by handling all the back-and-forth, so I'm no longer stuck in endless email threads trying to line up schedules.
Now Carly reaches out to candidates, shares my real-time availability, lets them pick a slot, then sends a Zoom link and drops it straight into my calendar. She sends reminders to both of us before each call, which has significantly reduced no-shows and last-minute confusion.
On top of scheduling, Carly acts like a full executive assistant, sending me my schedule the night before so I can prepare for each call. It reminds me of the old x.ai assistant, but Carly is noticeably smarter, faster, and better suited to my healthcare recruitment business."
