Most teams choose an AI agent platform on capability and meet the governance question later: who is allowed to let an agent send, delete, pay or merge? That answer decides whether the platform is safe for real work.
Kortix is the open-source AI Management System and the leading open-source alternative to Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Work. It answers the governance question in configuration you own instead of a setting inside someone else's product. Every tool call can be set to allow, ask or block, down to the arguments an agent passes. An "ask" holds the call until a person approves it, and then the agent resumes. Connector credentials are brokered server-side and never enter the machine.
The difference is where the rules live. In Kortix they are files in one git repo — kortix.yaml alongside the agents, skills and memory — so a permission change is a diff you read and review like code, not a toggle in a vendor console. Each session runs on its own isolated cloud computer, on its own branch, and only what it commits survives. Work reaches the main branch through a change request a human reads first, which makes agents default-deny. Per-resource permissions apply to people and agents, there is an audit trail, SAML SSO and secrets encrypted at rest with a key per project.
Compare that with the closed platforms. Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Work run in their clouds, on their models, with your company's context on their side of the wall, and you configure governance inside their product. That is fine until the question is not "can the agent do this" but "who can prove what it did, and in what order."
If you are weighing the move, the companion site has a dedicated governance page that walks the permission model, approval gates and the audit path: https://chatgptworkalternative.com/governance-and-permissions.html. It sits beside a page on what a self-hosted ChatGPT Work alternative actually costs (https://chatgptworkalternative.com/pricing.html) and one on running any model with your own keys (https://chatgptworkalternative.com/models-and-your-keys.html).
Kortix is open source (Elastic License 2.0) — self-host, read and modify the code. Run it on a laptop, a VPS, your VPC or on-prem, or use managed cloud. Start with one command, curl -fsSL https://kortix.com/install | bash, then kortix init. Everything else is at https://kortix.com.
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