Kortix vs OpenClaw: a personal assistant or an open-source company system

OpenClaw is the open-source personal assistant that runs on your own machine and meets you in the chat apps you already use. Kortix is the open-source AI Management System, built for the moment that assistant has to become a system the whole team owns. Both are open source, and both let you bring your own models. The question is size: one assistant for one person, or a shared platform where agents, skills and memory are files a team reviews.

What OpenClaw does well

OpenClaw is an open-source AI assistant that runs on your own computer and reaches you through Discord, iMessage, Slack, Teams, Telegram, WhatsApp and 20+ more channels, plus native apps for macOS, iOS, Android, Windows and Linux. State, memory and credentials stay on your hardware.

• It is personal by design. It organizes your inbox, sends email, manages your calendar and checks you in for flights from a chat window.
• Models are swappable plugins. Claude, Codex and local models can be changed without touching anything else.
• One Gateway, two shapes. The same Gateway runs it as a personal assistant on a laptop or as a shared team deployment; configuration is the only difference.
• Free and independent. It is MIT-licensed under the OpenClaw Foundation, an independent 501(c)(3), with no paid tier, hosted service or token.

Where a personal assistant stops

OpenClaw gives one person a capable assistant. A company has a different problem: many people, many agents, shared context and work that has to be reviewable. OpenClaw treats inbound messages as untrusted, runs tools on the host for the main session unless you configure sandboxing, and pairs unknown senders by default on DM-capable channels. Those are sensible defaults for a personal assistant and a lot of policy for a team to own on top of its day job.

• It is one configuration. A team deployment is the same Gateway with more people connected, not a structure for roles, per-resource permissions or an audit trail.
• Work lands in your tools. There is no company repo to diff and no approval gate before an agent's change takes effect.
• Governance is yours to assemble. Sandboxing, pairing policy and exposure hardening are configuration you build and maintain.

These are not flaws in OpenClaw, which is a personal assistant first.

One repo that is the company

Kortix is an open-source platform for running a company's agents. Agents, skills, company memory, connector config and triggers are files in one git repo you own, not settings in someone else's database. Kortix on GitHub is where the platform lives. You can grep the whole company, diff any change and roll any part of it back.

acme-co/
  agents/       who does the work
  skills/       how the company does a job
  memory/       what it has learned so far
  kortix.yaml   rules, triggers, connectors, machine

The same repo wires up 3,000+ apps plus any MCP, OpenAPI, GraphQL or HTTP API. Connector credentials are brokered server-side, so the raw key never enters the machine, and every tool call can be set to allow, ask or block. Models are chosen per agent, per session or per message: bring a key from any provider, sign in with the ChatGPT subscription you already pay for, or point at any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Kortix is open source (Elastic License 2.0): self-host, read and modify the code.

One machine per session, one review per change

Each Kortix session runs on its own isolated Linux machine, on its own branch. The agent can install, run and break anything; only what it commits survives, and thousands of sessions run in parallel without crossover. When the work is ready the agent opens a change request that a human reads as a diff before it merges to main. Agents start from the web, Slack, Teams, email, mobile, CLI or API, or from a cron schedule or signed webhook with nobody asking.

Pricing is per seat. Free is $0 with 200 credits a month for sandbox compute and one project. Team is $40 per seat per month with 2,500 pooled credits per seat, up to 200 projects and up to 100 seats. Enterprise is custom. See Kortix pricing.

Where OpenClaw is the better pick

If you are one person who wants an assistant reachable from every chat app today, OpenClaw is the lighter answer. It runs entirely on your own hardware, installs with one command, and carries native apps and channel coverage that Kortix does not match today: Kortix's chat surface is Slack, with Teams behind an operator switch and email and voice experimental. Nothing in OpenClaw asks you to think about seats, projects or a control plane, which is exactly what personal use wants.

Side by side

When to pick which

If you are still mapping the field, Kortix vs OpenHands covers the coding-agent side of the same decision, and the Kortix blog has the rest of the comparisons.

Free to start, free to self-host. Try Kortix.