Eigent is one of the strongest open-source desktop AI products to land this year. It is Apache-2.0 licensed, built on CAMEL-AI, and puts a multi-agent workforce on your own machine: parallel agents, local model inference through vLLM, Ollama or LM Studio, plus browser and terminal toolkits. For one person who wants a Cowork-style desktop app, it is a real option — and it is genuinely open source.
The question I have been running against it is the one that arrives later: what happens when the work stops being one person's?
A desktop app is the right shape for one operator
Eigent's design assumptions are all "one person, one machine":
- The agents and their configuration live in the app.
- Execution is local-first, on your laptop or desktop.
- The output arrives in the app for you to act on.
None of that is a flaw. It is what a desktop app should be. It is also the exact list of things that has to change when a team starts relying on the same agents.
The four things a team needs
When more than one person depends on an agent, four requirements appear at once.
Shared configuration you can diff. "Which prompt is production running?" should have an answer you can read in a git log, not a settings screen only one person can see.
Machines that aren't anyone's laptop. The agent that triages tickets at 3am cannot depend on your laptop being open — and two agents running the same job must not see each other's temporary state.
A gate before anything changes. Once an agent can send an email, update a CRM row or spend money, "it ran in the app" is not an audit trail. Someone has to approve the action, and the approval has to be recorded.
Real tool access, scoped. Your team's agents need the team's tools — tickets, docs, CRM, billing — with per-tool rules and credentials that don't sit on the agent's machine.
Where Kortix fits
Kortix is the open-source AI Operating System, and the open-source alternative to Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Work. It answers those four requirements directly:
- Agents, skills, memory and connectors are files in one git repo you own. Not settings in an app — text you can grep, diff and roll back.
- Each session runs on its own isolated cloud computer, on its own branch. Thousands run in parallel on one config, and only what an agent commits survives.
- Work lands through a change request. Merge is default-deny for agents; you read the diff before it reaches the default branch.
- Connectors are wired once and scoped per agent, with per-tool allow / ask / block rules down to the arguments of a call. An Ask holds the call until a person approves it.
It is also model-agnostic: any provider, your own keys, chosen per agent, per session or per message — or your own OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Self-host it for free, or use the managed cloud.
The honest split
Stay on Eigent while the agent is yours: your machine, your workflows, one operator.
Move to Kortix when the agent is the company's: shared tools, several people's context, and work that has to land under review.
You can see the full side-by-side — and the deployment path — at https://eigentalternative.com/kortix-vs-eigent, with the self-hosting and pricing questions covered on the same site.
Both are open source. They are just sized for different companies.
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