Index / OpenClaw · updated Oct 24, 2026
OpenClaw
openclaw/openclaw · healthy · rank 1 of 50 by stars
The canonical open-source personal AI assistant that runs on your own hardware and meets you in 20+ chat channels. Massive community, relentless release cadence, and a privacy-first 'your state stays on your devices' architecture.
Facts
Repository
Runtime
Posture
Community
Security breakdown
Composite 82 / 100 · how these are scored
higher is safer
higher is safer
higher is safer
higher is safer
higher is riskier
Model access
Read from the repository, not written by a model · 316 files examined
10 providers · runs locally · gateway support
Pinned models
gpt-6-astra released 2026-09-04 — 2 months old (from the public model catalogue)
Pin last edited 22 days ago
Evidence
Baseline project
OpenClaw is the reference point for every alternative on this site.
Use OpenClaw as the baseline when you want maximum ecosystem breadth, then compare it against narrower tools that optimize for security, local-first operation, team workflows, or ultra-lightweight deployment.
Star activity
392,930 stars today
Overview
OpenClaw is the reference open-source personal AI assistant: a single Gateway process runs on your own hardware and connects you to Discord, iMessage, Slack, Teams, Telegram, WhatsApp, and 20+ other channels, plus native apps for macOS, iOS, Android, Windows, and Linux. State, memory, and credentials live locally; model providers and agent harnesses (Claude, Codex, local models) are swappable plugins, and the same binary scales from a laptop assistant to a shared team deployment with only configuration changes.
The architecture follows a 'trusted gateway, untrusted execution, deterministic policy' model, with telemetry limited to an opt-out daily version check and opt-in anonymous statistics. Recent commits show heavy investment in reliability: durable progress-attachment custody across restarts, host-owned SQLite brokers for session lifecycle, doctor/migration repair tooling, and CI policy hardening — evidence of a maturing, production-grade codebase.
As the upstream project, OpenClaw defines the category that clones (Hermes, Muse, BetterClaw, AnyClaw) differentiate against. Its strengths are ecosystem breadth (5,400+ community skills), a foundation-governed MIT license with no paid tier, and an aggressive release cadence (v2026.9.x with atomic updates and plugin hot reloading). Trade-offs include a Node.js resource footprint, occasional regressions from fast shipping, and setup complexity for non-technical users.