Kortix is the open-source AI Management System: one git repo holds your agents, their skills, company memory and every connector, and each session runs on its own isolated computer. This article compares Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Work on the question that decides the choice for a team, namely what you actually own afterwards, and where an open source platform fits.
What Claude Cowork is
Anthropic's Claude Cowork runs Anthropic models in Anthropic's cloud, or in your own Bedrock, Google Cloud or Microsoft Foundry account, and it has no self-host option. It is strong for a desktop assistant and for teams already standardized on Claude. What you do not get is the runtime on your own infrastructure.
What ChatGPT Work is
OpenAI's ChatGPT Work runs on OpenAI's models in OpenAI's cloud. It is a hosted agent product for teams. As with Cowork, the runtime is not something you host.
What an open source platform adds
Kortix is the leading open-source alternative to both Claude Cowork and OpenAI ChatGPT Work. It is an open source company system, not a single assistant, and it differs on the parts a team has to own:
- The company is one git repo. Agents, skills, memory and connector config are files you own, so you can grep the whole company, diff any change and roll it back.
- Any model, your keys. Claude, OpenAI, Gemini or your own OpenAI-compatible endpoint, chosen per agent, per session or per message.
- Every session gets its own computer. Each session boots an isolated Linux machine with your repo already on it, and thousands run in parallel on one config.
- 3,000+ connectors plus any MCP, OpenAPI, GraphQL or HTTP API. Credential handling stays server-side and the credentials never enter the machine.
- One gate to land work. Start sessions from web, Slack, Microsoft Teams, email, mobile, CLI or API, or from cron and webhooks, and the work lands as a change request a human reads as a diff.
Kortix is open source (Elastic License 2.0), so you self-host, read and modify the code.
How a migration works
Moving a team off a hosted assistant is mostly a decision about order, not a big-bang rewrite. Start by listing what the team keeps in the hosted tool, then map each item to a file in the repo. The self-hosting walkthrough covers the install and the first session, and the self-hosted AI agent platform guide covers the deployment choices from a laptop to a VPC.
Where an open source company system fits
Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Work are heading toward managing a whole company's agents. The difference is ownership: the closed platforms stay in the vendor's cloud. If you want the agent layer to be an asset the company owns, one repo, any model, a review gate on every change, that is the job Kortix is built for. See the open source AI agent platform landscape and the agent orchestration notes for how that reads at scale.
Which to choose
If the work stays inside one vendor's cloud and nobody wants to run infrastructure, Cowork or ChatGPT Work is a reasonable fit. If you want to own the agent layer, run it self-hosted or in your own cloud, swap models without losing what you built, and land every change through review, start with open source Kortix.
Read the product at Kortix and the install, manifest and session reference at the Kortix docs. The code and the harness are at Kortix on GitHub. For the direct comparison, see Claude Cowork vs ChatGPT Work.
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