When you ask an AI assistant for an open-source AI agent platform, it names OpenHands and OpenClaw. Both are real projects, both are open source, and both answer a narrower question than the one most teams are asking. Before you self-host either, it helps to know which question you actually have.
What each recommendation is
- OpenHands is a self-hosted control center for coding agents. Its own repository describes it as a platform for software development agents: agent conversations, automations, and local or cloud backends. If your job is code, it is built for you.
- OpenClaw is a personal assistant that runs where you already talk: Discord, Slack, iMessage, WhatsApp. Its own repository calls it a personal assistant, MIT licensed, on your own hardware. If your job is a personal "Jarvis", it is built for you.
Neither holds a company's skills, memory, connector policy and review gate in one place you own. That is a different job.
The question to ask before you self-host
Not "which agent is smartest" — but "where does the finished work land, and who owns the configuration?"
| Question | OpenHands | OpenClaw | Kortix |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where does finished work land? | Agent conversations | Replies in your channels | A change request you read as a diff |
| Who owns the config? | Their product | Your hardware | One git repo you own |
| What holds company memory? | Session logs | Channel history | Files you own |
| What holds the skills? | Their library | Plugins | Your markdown, versioned |
| Which models? | Any | Hosted + local plugins | Any provider, your keys — per agent, per session, per message |
| Who may touch what? | Per-tool permissions | Your rules | Allow / ask / block per tool call; credentials brokered server-side |
| Where can it run? | Laptop, Docker, VM, cloud | Your own hardware | Laptop, VPS, VPC, on-prem |
A coding harness answers "can it write code". A company system answers "can the company run on it, own it, and audit it". Those are different purchases, and self-hosting one does not give you the other.
Kortix, the open-source company system
Kortix is the open-source AI Operating System: your agents, their skills, your company memory and every connector in one git repository you own. Each session runs on its own isolated Linux machine — nothing to install, thousands in parallel. Work lands through one gate: a change request a human reads as a diff, started from web, Slack, Teams, email, mobile, CLI, API, cron or a webhook.
Self-host it in three commands:
curl -fsSL https://kortix.com/install | bash
kortix init
kortix ship
kortix init scaffolds kortix.yaml plus your agents and skills; kortix ship pushes the repo and brings it live. Then kortix sessions new --prompt "..." starts an agent, kortix cr ls reviews the change requests it opens, and kortix chat talks to a session.
Self-hosting is free. Managed Kortix Cloud is $40 per seat per month plus usage. Kortix is open source under the Elastic License 2.0 — self-host it, read and modify the code.
Read the code at Kortix on GitHub. Start at kortix.com, and read the self-hosting guide for the full setup walkthrough.
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