Claude Cowork vs OpenClaw, and the open source system a team owns

What Claude Cowork is

Claude Cowork is Anthropic's agent for knowledge work. You describe an outcome, and it runs multi-step tasks inside Claude's app on desktop, web and mobile, with scheduled tasks and projects. Cowork is available on paid plans: Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise. Its sessions run in the cloud on Anthropic's servers in an isolated environment, and the sessions and files save to your Claude account, so the work follows you across surfaces. To touch a local file or a browser, Cowork reaches your machine through the Claude Desktop app (Get started with Claude Cowork).

Anthropic is direct about the risks. The safe-use guidance separates read tools from write tools, warns that prompt injection arrives through the content Claude reads, and notes that computer use runs without the permission checks that gate other tools (Use Claude Cowork safely). Those are real controls to plan around. They also live inside Anthropic's product, on Anthropic's models, in Anthropic's cloud.

What OpenClaw is

OpenClaw is an open-source AI assistant that runs on your own computer and meets you in the channels you already use. Its own repository describes Discord, iMessage, Slack, Teams, Telegram, WhatsApp and more than twenty more, plus native apps for macOS, iOS, Android, Windows and Linux. One Gateway runs it as a personal assistant on a laptop or as a shared team deployment, and configuration is the only difference between the two (OpenClaw on GitHub).

State, memory and credentials live on your hardware, and the models and agent harnesses are plugins you swap without changing anything else. The project's own site states that there is no paid tier, hosted service or token, and that it is stewarded by an independent foundation (openclaw.ai). So OpenClaw and Claude Cowork answer the ownership question in opposite ways, and both keep the work at the scale of one person or one machine.

When to choose which

Choose OpenClaw if you want a personal assistant on your own hardware, reachable from the chat apps you already keep open, with your own models. Choose Claude Cowork if you want an agent inside the Claude app you already pay for, on Anthropic's models, with the managed admin controls that come with Team and Enterprise plans.

Choose Kortix if the unit of work is a team or a whole company. Kortix is the open-source AI Operating System: your agents, skills, company memory, and connectors in one git repo you own, with the agents working on real cloud computers. That is the difference the other two do not cover. A team needs shared configuration it can read, a rule on which agent may touch which tool, and a review step before an agent's work reaches anything real. The open-source Claude Cowork alternatives page maps the wider field, and Claude Cowork vs OpenWork covers one of the open-source desktops.

Why a team picks Kortix

In Kortix, configuration is files a team can diff and review. An agent is agents/<name>.md (behavior) plus an agents.<name> block in kortix.yaml (governance). Each session has its own isolated machine and branch. Session work reaches main through a change request. Merge is default-deny for agents. Per-resource permissions cover people and agents, with roles, groups, and an audit trail. Run it on Kortix Cloud, in your VPC, or on your own on-prem network. Self-host is free. The source is public at Kortix on GitHub, and if you already run Claude Cowork, migrating to Kortix starts with one job in one repo. For a worked comparison against the closed incumbent, Read the Kortix blog.