Compare · Agent Approve
Agent Approve is a cloud-backed approval, policy and observability layer for coding agents, with iPhone and Apple Watch apps. Agent hooks and plugins on your machine send events through its cloud to your phone, where you approve or deny under centralized allow/deny policies. Its terms say it is not a security product.
Facts about Agent Approve come from its own public pages, accessed (sources below). "Not established" means those sources did not show it, not that it is missing.
| Aspect | Agent Approve | handup |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Governance and observability for coding agents: command approvals, centralized allow/deny policies, notifications and voice follow-ups. | A standalone approval inbox: agents and scripts ask before risky steps, and you approve, deny with a note, or answer. It never runs agents and never runs anything on its own. |
| Agents | Hook integrations for Claude Code, Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot CLI, OpenAI Codex, OpenHands, VS Code GitHub Copilot and Windsurf; plugins for Antigravity, Antigravity CLI, Hermes, OpenClaw, OpenCode and Pi. Capabilities differ by integration; Codex hooks are experimental. | Claude Code and Codex through permission hooks plus MCP. Cursor, omp and any MCP client through MCP tools the agent calls (omp also has an optional tool-gating bridge). Shell scripts and CI through the CLI. |
| Where you decide | iPhone and Apple Watch apps (iPad layouts in release notes). Android, desktop or browser approval: not established in the reviewed sources. | Terminal inbox, Linux, macOS and Windows desktop app and Android app (sideloaded APK). A browser inbox for iPhone and other devices ships after v0.1.1. No native iPhone app. |
| Price | $14.99 per month through the App Store, with a 7-day free trial. | $30 USD one-time personal license, plus tax where applicable, after a 14-day trial. One person, their own machines. No team licensing. |
| Hosting | Vendor cloud relays messages between your machine and phone. A self-hosted edition: not established. | A daemon on your machines; your phone connects over Tailscale or a self-hosted end-to-end encrypted relay (Linux binary included in releases). The managed relay is not for sale. |
| Source code | Open-source license not established; the public GitHub repository is for support and issues. | Private. Downloads are public compiled binaries. |
| Privacy | TLS, encryption at rest and optional end-to-end encryption. Tool, event, agent, timestamp and decision metadata stay in cleartext. Privacy tiers control how much command content is kept; retention is configurable from one day to one year. | Requests, previews and decisions are stored on your machines; the apps have no telemetry or analytics. License activation and rechecks contact gethandup.dev, and optional push notifications include request titles by default. |
Free for 14 days, no signup. Setup guides per agent.
All accessed . Prices are as displayed then; taxes, hosting and underlying AI subscriptions can be extra. Vendor security statements are their claims, not audits.