We built an alternative to OpenClaw

#ai #automation #tooling

The TL;DR

We built Friday Studio, a source available alternative to OpenClaw, with chat based workflow creation, MCP tools, skills, and shareable workspaces. Chat from Telegram, Slack, Discord, and more.

Check it out at https://github.com/friday-platform/friday-studio

What is it

Friday Studio is a chat based automation tool that works locally on your computer, just like OpenClaw. You provide your own keys for connecting to the model of your choice and everything stays local to your computer.

It’s source available, fork-able, and comes with a few pre-made workspaces and built-in MCP tools to get you started.

Why we made it

There are a lot of companies getting into the AI automation space. We started developing Friday last year and saw a lot of them come online. Every time, we noted what they lack:

Repeatability and durability
Deep introspection into how runs work
Ease of use (cough OpenClaw)
Choosing your own model
Sharing your setup with others
Accessing them from the services you already use (Slack, email, etc)

How does it work

The easiest way to see how automation in Friday works is to check out our examples

Friday creates workspaces, either via natural chat or programmatically (we recommend starting with chat). These workspaces use a Finite-State Machine to manage signals, jobs, agents, and memory to create reproducible work.

For example, you can create a job that fetches your calendar every morning, researches external invitees, and emails you a summary of your day and details about who you're meeting with. Instead of trusting a prompt to do this consistently, every morning, Friday creates a workspace with a job and various agents:

Agent 1: Uses the Google calendar MCP to fetch a list of events. Setups data contracts to ensure the output is either a consistent array of JSON entries, or a failure response
Agent 2: Reads the data contract and loops over each entry. Checks for external invitees based on email domain and uses the agent-browser MCP and searches the web for them. Returns a list of results
Agent 3: Summarizes the results and compares them against the list in Agent 1. Sends an email using the Gmail MCP to the stored email address your provided

The job is triggered via a signal, which is a CRON that runs every morning at your preferred time. You can view every run of the job and see exactly what was retrieved and outputted through each agent and tool call.

Ease of use and interoperability

One thing we really care about is making this easy to use (for a technical audience) and to be flexible with what you use.

Connect to Slack, Discord, Teams, WhatsApp or Telegram to chat with your workspaces.
One click connect to services that need OAuth or add API Keys. These are always separated from your workspaces so sharing is easy and secure.
Bring your own models and switch them when necessary (remember that Claude outage Wednesday?)
Bring all of your memory, skills, and MCP tools (custom or otherwise) and scope them globally or per workspace.
Export all of your workspaces and data, including memories and skills.