Claude Cowork vs OpenWork, and the open-source option a team owns

How a team chooses between Claude Cowork and OpenWork

Claude Cowork is Anthropic's agent for knowledge work. It runs inside Claude's app on web, desktop and mobile, works in the folders and tools you choose, and keeps the work history in your Claude account. OpenWork is a different shape: an open-source desktop app built on OpenCode, where agents work on files that stay on your machine, and a team can self-host the control plane that shares skills and MCP connections.

The question neither product asks

Both tools assume the work happens inside a product rather than in a repository the team controls. One person using an agent does not feel the difference. A team running several agents across shared systems does, and three questions decide the fit: where the agent configuration lives, who can let an agent touch which tool, and where agent work is reviewed before it reaches anything real. The comparison table on this page sets the three options against those questions.

What each option gives a team

Claude Cowork puts an agent inside Anthropic's cloud and adds admin controls on Teams and Enterprise, where access is set by team, tool permissions are set by department, and activity streams to your SIEM. OpenWork puts a local-first desktop app on each machine and a control plane that publishes capabilities and shared connections to a team or an organization. Kortix is the open-source AI Operating System: your agents, their skills, your company memory, and every connector in one git repo you own. Kortix is open source. Read it, fork it, audit it. In Kortix, configuration lives as files a team can read and diff:

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

The fork: who owns the work

When a hosted agent finishes a task, the result is an artifact inside the vendor's product. Kortix runs the work on real cloud computers and lands it in the repo the team started from. Each session has its own isolated machine and branch. Session work reaches main through a change request. Merge is default-deny for agents, so a person reads the diff and decides. Per-resource permissions for people and agents. Roles, groups, and an audit trail. All of it lives in the repo, so a team can read the rules an agent runs under. Run it on Kortix Cloud, in your VPC, or on your own on-prem network. Self-host is free, and the self-hosting guide covers the install.

How to decide

If the goal is a polished agent inside the app you already pay for, and one person or a small team is doing the work, Claude Cowork or OpenWork will get you there. If the goal is a system a whole company owns, where the configuration, the memory and the review gate live in a repo rather than a vendor account, choose Kortix, the leading open-source alternative to Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Work. The open-source Claude Cowork alternatives page maps the wider field, and Read the Kortix blog for a worked comparison.