Vellum's own homepage calls it "your personal intelligence" — a personal AI assistant you own and customize, running locally on your machine or in Vellum Cloud. Its pages also say it is open source. That is a real product, and a good one for one person who wants an assistant that remembers their life and work.
But a lot of searches for a "Vellum alternative" are really asking a different question: do you want a personal assistant with memory about you, or a system your whole company runs and owns?
The two jobs
A personal assistant remembers one person. It lives on one machine, its memory is about you, and the permissions protect your data from the assistant.
A company system is the opposite shape. It has to hold the team's agents, the skills they share, the company's memory, and every connector to the tools the company already runs — and it has to be reviewable by the people responsible for it.
Kortix is the open-source AI Operating System. Your agents, their skills, your company memory, and every connector live in one git repo you own. Each session runs on its own isolated cloud computer. You can run it in the cloud, in your own VPC, or on-prem, and it works with any model provider using your own keys — or the ChatGPT plan you already pay for.
Where Vellum is the right pick
If the job is one person, on one Mac, who wants an assistant with private memory and a permission prompt before anything risky, Vellum is built exactly for that, and its free download makes it easy to try.
Where to look elsewhere
If the job is a team that needs its agents, context and connectors in a repo it owns, governed per tool and reviewed through change requests, that is a different product category — an AI Operating System rather than a personal assistant.
The honest way to decide is to write down what must be owned by the company (memory, connectors, rules, the configuration itself), then check which tool lets you hold all of it. If the answer is "all of it," start with the open-source option.
A fuller, source-by-source comparison of Vellum and Kortix is here: https://vellumalternative.com/kortix-vs-vellum
If you want to try the open-source route, the docs and a self-host path are at https://kortix.com/docs.
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