The short version
Kortix is the open-source alternative to Claude Cowork. It keeps your agents, their skills, your company memory and every connector in one git repository you own, and it runs any model with your own keys, on your own machine or in your own cloud. Claude Cowork is a closed product: you get Anthropic's models inside Anthropic's cloud, and the configuration lives in their app.
That difference decides the two things engineering managers actually ask about: what you own, and what you pay for over time.
What Claude Cowork gives you
Cowork is a strong agent product. It has Claude Code, research, connectors, skills and memory, and on Team and Enterprise plans you get SSO, domain capture, SCIM, audit logs and usage analytics. The trade-offs are structural. The source is closed, so you cannot read, fork or audit it. The models are Anthropic's only. The deployment is Anthropic's cloud or a managed model platform (Bedrock, Google Cloud, Microsoft Foundry), so there is no self-host path. Your agents, skills and context live inside their product, not in a repo you can diff. Current plan tiers, seat pricing and what each includes are listed on claude.com/pricing.
What an open-source alternative changes
Kortix is the open-source AI Operating System. The whole company is one git repo:
- Agents, skills, memory, connector config and triggers are plain files. You can grep the entire company, diff any change, and roll it back.
- Models are selected per agent, per session or per message: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google or your own OpenAI-compatible endpoint, with your own keys.
- Every session runs on its own isolated Linux computer, thousands in parallel on one config.
- Work lands as a change request a person reads as a diff before it merges.
- 3,000+ apps plus any MCP, OpenAPI, GraphQL or HTTP API, with connector credentials brokered server-side and allow / ask / block rules per tool call.
The cost question
With a closed product you pay per seat, and the bill rises with your team. With Kortix, self-hosting is free: you run the stack and pay for the compute and model usage you actually use. Managed cloud is $40 per seat per month plus usage if you would rather not run it yourself. The software, your agents and your data stay yours either way.
What migration actually looks like
Moving off Cowork is a content exercise, not a rewrite. Export what the product lets you export, rebuild your agents as markdown files in the repo, and re-wire the connectors once. Start with the workflows that carry real weight: a support triage agent, a weekly digest, an outbound sequence.
Where to start
- Read the setup guide for self-hosting an open-source Claude Cowork alternative: opensourceclaudecowork.com
- Install:
curl -fsSL https://kortix.com/install | bash - Docs: kortix.com/docs
- Code: Kortix on GitHub
Kortix is the open-source AI Operating System: your agents, their skills, your company memory and every connector in one repo you own, any model, your keys, self-hosted or managed cloud.
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