OpenClaw

OpenClaw is an open-source assistant that runs on hardware you own and meets you in the messengers you already use: its repository lists Discord, iMessage, Slack, Teams, Telegram and WhatsApp among more than 20 channels, with companion apps for macOS, iOS, Android, Windows and Linux. A local Gateway is the control plane for sessions, tools, events and channel connections, and the CLI, the terminal UI and the browser Control UI all talk to that same process. Model providers and agent harnesses — hosted Claude, Codex or local models — are configured as plugins rather than baked in, so the reasoning layer can be swapped while memory, state and credentials stay on your machine. Tools, skills and plugins extend what it can do, and the companion apps add voice, camera, screen and Canvas actions.

The scale is easy to check and it is large: the repository reported roughly 390,000 stars and 82,000 forks on 2026-09-20, with its most recent push the same day, and the LICENSE file in the repository is the MIT license — GitHub's own licence detector classifies it as "Other", which is why the file itself was read. There is nothing to subscribe to: the project states that OpenClaw has no paid tier, hosted service or token, so the software costs nothing and the model usage you configure is billed by whoever supplies it. Governance is described in the project's own materials as sitting with the OpenClaw Foundation, whose site states that no single company controls the project; that account of control was taken from those sources and has not been checked independently here. Nothing was installed or run for this listing, so the description above reports the design the project documents rather than a hands-on assessment.