Open source Perplexity Computer alternative: what you actually own

Perplexity Computer is a strong general-purpose digital worker. It runs multi-step workflows in the cloud, routes across a set of hosted models, and connects to the tools a team already uses, including Gmail, Slack and Notion (Perplexity Computer). If you are evaluating it, the useful question is not whether it works. It is where the configuration, the memory and the credentials live, and whether you can move them.

For a growing number of teams the answer is an open source system they host themselves. Kortix is the open-source AI Management System, the leading open-source alternative to Claude Cowork and OpenAI ChatGPT Work, and the one that keeps the whole company in a git repository you own.

The ownership question, not the feature list

Closed agent platforms, Perplexity Computer among them, are becoming company operating systems. They hold the agents, the skills, the memory and the connectors. The difference is that you will never own that configuration: it lives in the vendor's product, under the vendor's administration, on the vendor's cloud.

Kortix inverts that. Your agents, their skills, your company memory, the connector configuration and the triggers are markdown and YAML files in one repo. Not settings in someone else's database, files you can grep, diff and roll back.

That single design choice changes several things at once:

• You can read the system. Every change to an agent or a skill is a commit, and every change lands through a change request a person reads as a diff before it reaches the default branch.
• You can move it. Self-host on a laptop, a VPS, inside your VPC, or on-prem. Managed cloud is an option, not a requirement.
• You can bring your own models. Per agent, per session or per message: Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, or your own OpenAI-compatible endpoint with your own keys. Switch the day a better model lands.
• You can reach your tools. 3,000+ apps plus any MCP, OpenAPI, GraphQL or HTTP API. Credentials are brokered server-side and never enter the machine, and every tool call is set to allow, ask or block, down to the arguments.
• You can run work in isolation. Each session boots its own isolated Linux machine on its own branch. Thousands run in parallel on one config with no crossover.

Kortix and Perplexity Computer side by side

The head-to-head is covered in full in the Kortix vs Perplexity Computer comparison. The deciding rows are these:

	Perplexity Computer	Kortix
Source	Closed	Open source (Elastic License 2.0)
Configuration	In Perplexity's product	Files in a git repo you own
Models	Hosted, auto-routed	Any provider, your own keys
Where it runs	Perplexity's cloud	Laptop, VPS, VPC, on-prem or managed cloud
Review gate	In-product approval	Change request a human reads as a diff

The wider field of open source options is worth reading before you decide, and the open source Perplexity Computer alternatives compared puts Kortix beside OpenClaw, Eigent, Vellum, AnythingLLM and Lobehub on licence, hosting and review.

Start in three commands

Kortix is a CLI and a git repo. Install it, scaffold a project, and ship:

curl -fsSL https://kortix.com/install | bash
kortix init
kortix ship

Then describe the work and review what the agent proposes:

kortix sessions new --prompt "Summarise this week's activity and open a change request" --wait
kortix cr ls

From there the loop is: an agent works on its own machine, commits to its own branch, and proposes a change request you merge. Your company system improves one reviewed change at a time.

Who should pick which

Pick Perplexity Computer if you want a managed digital worker and are happy for the configuration and data to stay inside a subscription. Pick open source Kortix if you want to own the system: the agents, the skills, the memory, the connectors and the review gate, in a repo you can host anywhere and read end to end.

Kortix is open source (Elastic License 2.0): self-host, read and modify the code. Get started at kortix.com, or clone it from Kortix on GitHub.