OpenClaw is a great open-source personal assistant. That is a different job from running a company's work.
OpenClaw made personal AI agents mainstream: a capable open-source assistant that lives on your own machine and gets things done for one person. If you are an individual, it is one of the best answers available. If you are a team deciding what to standardise on, the question changes. A personal assistant optimises for one operator. A company needs a platform where many agents run the same work, share the same memory, and land changes a person reviews.
That is the gap Kortix fills. Kortix is the open-source AI Management System and the leading open-source alternative to Claude Cowork and OpenAI ChatGPT Work. Your agents, their skills, your company memory and every connector live in one git repo you own, and each session runs on its own isolated cloud computer.
The two jobs
| OpenClaw | Kortix | |
|---|---|---|
| Who it serves | One person, one machine | A whole team, thousands of sessions |
| Configuration | Local setup on your device | Files in a git repo you own |
| Where it runs | Your laptop | Self-host on a laptop, VPS, VPC or on-prem, or managed cloud |
| Model choice | Your chosen models | Any provider with your own keys, per agent, per session, per message |
| How work lands | You accept the change | A change request a human reads as a diff |
| Open source | Yes | Yes — open source (Elastic License 2.0), self-host, read and modify the code |
OpenClaw is the personal-Jarvis shape. Kortix is the company shape: agents, skills, memory, connectors and triggers are all text in one repo, versioned and diffable, so the whole company can grep it, review a change, and roll any part back.
Where a team outgrows a personal agent
- Sharing. A personal assistant's context lives on one machine. Kortix keeps the company's memory and skills in the shared repo, so a new teammate or a new agent starts with what the company already knows.
- Governance. A personal agent runs as you. Kortix sets per-tool permissions — allow, ask or block, down to the arguments of a call — and every change reaches main only through a change request you approve.
- Scale. Kortix runs thousands of isolated sessions in parallel on one configuration, each on its own branch. One machine running one assistant does not scale to a team's backlog.
- Tools. Kortix reaches 3,000+ apps plus any MCP, OpenAPI, GraphQL or HTTP API, with connector credentials brokered server-side and never entering the machine.
What to do with this
If you are one person working on your own files, stay with OpenClaw. If you are a team that needs to own the agents, the memory and the review gate, compare the two properly before you commit. The side-by-side, the migration path and the self-hosting steps are on openclaw-alternative.com:
- Kortix vs OpenClaw — the head-to-head
- The open-source OpenClaw alternatives — the wider field
- Self-host an OpenClaw alternative — the setup
- Migrate from OpenClaw — what to move and in what order
Kortix is open source and self-hosts for free. Start at kortix.com or read the code at Kortix on GitHub.
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