Personal assistant
OpenClaw
Open-source personal AI assistant that runs on the user's own devices and is reached through messaging apps, a CLI and a web UI.
Compare only what the shape makes comparable.
Runs entirely on the user's own devices. README: 'a personal AI assistant that runs on your devices... designed for a single operator'. Installers for macOS, Linux, WSL2 and Windows PowerShell; also published as the npm package openclaw. Docs list Docker and Nix deployment paths and VPS hosting options.
Named: Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI (GPT, ChatGPT/Codex OAuth), Google (Gemini API, Vertex), Mistral, Cohere, Groq, DeepSeek, xAI (Grok), Moonshot (Kimi), OpenRouter, Ollama (local), LM Studio (local), vLLM (self-hosted), SGLang (self-hosted), llama.cpp (local), GitHub Copilot, Together, Cerebras, NVIDIA, Hugging Face, Z.AI (GLM), MiniMax
- MCP support
- Plugins / custom tools
- Subagents / parallel agents
- Hooks / lifecycle events
- Persistent memory
- Background execution
- Sandboxing / permissions
- Git / PR integration
Sandboxing is off by default: 'Tools run on the host for the main session unless you configure sandboxing.' src↗
README security guidance: 'Treat inbound messages as untrusted input.' DM-capable channels pair unknown senders by default and require operator approval. src↗
Designed for a single operator, not a team. src↗
No parallel execution within a single agent conversation, and no cross-agent memory search. src↗
Node is a required runtime because the canonical state store uses node:sqlite; Linux companion desktop apps are planned rather than shipped. src↗
If MEMORY.md grows too large, OpenClaw truncates the injected version while keeping the full file on disk. src↗
- first_release
No first-party page states a launch date. 2025-11 is taken from the repo's own release history: the repository was created 2025-11-24 and the earliest published releases (v0.1.1–v0.1.3) are dated 2025-11-25. Those early tags carry the name 'warelay' and the project was renamed twice (Clawdbot, then Moltbot, then OpenClaw), so the tag names do not match the current product name.
- open_source.license
GitHub's API classifies the license as 'other', but the LICENSE file read directly is verbatim MIT, copyright 2026 OpenClaw Foundation, with a pointer to THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md for incorporated code. Recorded as MIT on the file's own text.
- interfaces (api)
The Gateway is a local control plane that the CLI, TUI and Control UI connect to, and the docs list an admin HTTP RPC surface for plugins, but no first-party page describing a general-purpose public API was opened this session, so 'api' was left out.
- model_support
Recorded as model-agnostic because local and self-hosted endpoints (Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp) are supported alongside 30+ hosted vendors. The docs note provider-specific logic lives in per-provider plugins while OpenClaw keeps the generic inference loop, so adding a genuinely new provider means a plugin rather than a config line.
What people say about OpenClaw
167 opinions · 2026-02-03 to 2026-08-20 · high confidence
Hand-classified 167 opinions across four platforms; score = (pos; neg) / total * 100. Raised to high confidence: the sample is large, spans seven months, and three independent platforms agree on direction (all negative), though they disagree sharply on degree.
Second pass added 66 Reddit opinions (r/LocalLLaMA x4 threads, r/selfhosted security thread), 6 more third-party GitHub issue bodies, and one long first-person blog review. Mix is now HN 92 / Reddit 66 / GitHub 8 / blog 1; YouTube and X remain 0. The premise that Reddit would soften HN did not hold: r/LocalLLaMA is markedly HARSHER (-65 vs HN's -26), dominated by an astroturfing argument largely absent from HN. Those threads are self-selecting—three of the four are framed as challenges ('Anyone actually using', 'why is openclaw even this popular', 'So what happened'), and several commenters believe the sub was bot-brigaded, which means some of what I counted may not be organic and some organic enthusiasm may have been downvoted out of view. GitHub is undercounted on purpose: maintainer steipete authored 24 of the last 100 issues and those are excluded as not-public-sentiment; all 8 counted GitHub entries are third-party bodies I read in full, never titles. The single blog (brandon.wang) is the most positive item in the whole sample and is one person. No usable YouTube comments—the one review video returns only the page shell.
- hackernews-26
- reddit-65
- github-75
GitHub reads 49 points lower than the highest platform here. Issue trackers collect defects only, so that number measures activity more than opinion. Why we publish it anyway.
A clear arc across seven months. February was peak hype and peak alarm at once—'OpenClaw is changing my life' ran alongside company-wide bans and a malware skill topping the marketplace. March through April was the reckoning: the security threads, the memory-reliability critique, and the 'Ask HN: who is actually using this?' thread where the dominant answer was some version of 'a cron job would do this'. Through spring the platform fights (Anthropic and Google restricting subscription use, then Anthropic relenting in April) kept it in the news without helping its reputation. By August the tone had shifted from argument to past tense—'the whole OpenClaw thing imploded'—even as the repo stayed the most-starred on GitHub and the issue tracker churned dozens of bugs a day. Adoption and esteem have visibly decoupled. SECOND-PASS PLATFORM DIVERGENCE: broadening off HN made the read worse, not better. r/LocalLLaMA scores -65 against HN's -26, and it is negative for a different reason—HN argues the product is unnecessary, Reddit argues the popularity was purchased. The two harshest Reddit threads predate and postdate the HN peak (Feb and Jul), so this is not one bad week. GitHub scores -75 but that is structural: issue trackers collect defects, and the volume there is evidence of live use, not of dissatisfaction. The lone blog review is the most enthusiastic item in the entire 167-opinion sample, which is itself a finding: sustained positive assessments exist mostly in long-form, single-author venues.
Praised for
- Phone-to-computer remote control11×
- Breaks activation energy on stalled chores9×
- Real production workflows at some shops7×
- Works well on cheap open-weight models5×
Complained about
- Popularity believed to be astroturfed24×
- Unsecurable by design21×
- Solution in search of a problem19×
- Hype looks manufactured14×
- Unreliable memory and constant breakage12×
- Codebase too large to audit8×
We're using OpenClaw to do a massive number of fixes and improvements to our ERP. It takes Jira tickets, resolves them, and creates a GitHub PR, which is then reviewed by another AI agent. ... So far it's been an amazing tool - I am very impressed.
Yes, yes it is. And it's amaaaazing. We're going to have lots of sharp edges getting stuff like this secured, but it is not going to go away. Too useful.
god what a pain in the ass to spin up a VM, configure Prometheus, configure grafana ... I just end up never doing it. Got it done in a couple hours with openclaw. ... for now, it's fun running down my half decade old todo list.
It gives me a pleasant interface to talk to my desktop from my phone. I can just send my computer a discord message and have it execute some arbitrarily complex task for me.
I run my OpenClaw on whatever is the latest GLM model and ever since the release of GLM 5 it has been a smooth ride. The models solve whatever problem I throw at them and the code is good enough that I barely ever have to look at it...
No it's slop and most of the hype was manufactured marketing. It has 0 utility, and any perceived utility you can build yourself easily
do you think anybody has actually read all 700k lines of the ai generated code?
I never want to be one wayward email away from an AI tool dumping my company's entire slack history into a public github issue.
The first company to deliver a truly secure Claw is going to make millions of dollars. I have no idea how anyone is going to do that.
I haven't found ANY uses for it where it actually did what it was supposed to do.
It was the software updates that prevented OpenClaw working for me. OpenClaw broke every update for a month, so I gave up and moved to Hermes.
Many companies have totally banned it. For example at Qt it is banned on all company devices and networks
I used it for a bit in Jan. And found it to be a much worse version of Claude Code. But I'm exploring setting up Hermes from scratch so my family can interact with it in a group chat.
10/80/10 10% done by an assistant that's been trained on the task (or a dev or me) 80% heavy lifting done by claw 10% review and corrections
the entire resolved skills catalog (
skillsSnapshot, ~293 KB) is duplicated into everysession_nodes.entry_jsonrow ... blocks the gateway event loop for 5-10 s per write...
Openclaw is a bloated messy pile of shit. I ditched it after a few days. You're better off making your own simple wrapper (with channel integrations to telegram / email and event scheduler) around a simple coding agent CLI like "pi".
Someone is astroturfing the hell out of it. There are bots spamming this sub with OC-promoting posts every single day! ... journalists are writing articles about it but they have to be paid puff-pieces, because there's nothing newsworthy about it.
If the only way to run it securely, is to isolate it to its own sandbox with no access to the machine itself, the internet, or any accounts, then what's the point of it?
Configuration is a mess and the web ui borderline unusable but it did one thing right: Have it on a local machine (vm in my case) and let it be controlled via chat. ... it just runs nmap without me telling it how to do it.
I am using it for 5days. Its because many want a personal assistant and this is the first app I have seen that does it easily. ... This is more iPhone type moment, it does nothing new but it's a better package for more poeple.
i'm now not sure i want to go back to a world without openclaw. ... it gets meaningfully better the more you use it, and it gets better in a fast, organic way.
openclaw doesn't know when to give up. its determination is usually a strength, but it lacks the human circuit breaker.
Pretty much 80% of my token usage is getting openclaw to unfuck itself.
The
ttstool belongs to no built-in tool profile, and nothing says so. ... A voice-capable assistant on that profile silentl[y]