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

Claude Cowork and Perplexity Computer, and where a team's options diverge

Perplexity Computer is a hosted agent from Perplexity that takes a described outcome, splits it into subtasks, and runs sub-agents across a managed mix of frontier models. Every task runs in an isolated compute environment in Perplexity's cloud, and the result comes back as a finished deliverable inside Perplexity's product. Claude Cowork is Anthropic's version of the same shape: an agent for knowledge work, running inside Claude's app, with the work history kept in your Claude account.

Both keep the source and the machine

Neither Perplexity Computer nor Claude Cowork publishes its source, and neither offers a self-hosted edition. Perplexity Computer is available on paid Perplexity plans, and Claude Cowork is included on paid Claude plans, so the work runs on the vendor's cloud under the vendor's terms. A team that needs the agent configuration, the memory and the review gate in infrastructure it controls needs a platform it can own.

What a team owns with Kortix

Kortix is the open-source AI Operating System: your agents, their skills, your company memory, and every connector in one git repo you own. The repo is the unit a team owns, and the layout is the one the rest of this site shows:

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

Run it on Kortix Cloud, in your VPC, or on your own on-prem network. Self-host is free, and the self-hosting guide walks through the install. Any model provider with your own keys, so the model is a choice the team makes rather than one baked into the platform. 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 before anything lands.

How to decide

If the job is to hand a described outcome to a hosted agent and get a polished deliverable back, Perplexity Computer and Claude Cowork both do that, and the plan you already pay for decides between them. If the job is a workforce whose agents, memory and connector config live in a repo the team owns, on a model it chooses, pick Kortix, the leading open-source alternative to Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Work. The open-source Claude Cowork alternatives page maps the wider field of owned options, and Read the Kortix blog for a worked comparison.