Index / OpenClaw · updated Oct 2, 2026
OpenClaw
openclaw/openclaw · healthy · rank 1 of 43 by stars
The original open-source personal AI assistant that runs on your own hardware and meets you in 20+ chat channels. Massive community, rapid release cadence, and a plugin-based model architecture make it the reference implementation everything else is compared against.
Facts
Repository
Runtime
Posture
Community
Security breakdown
Composite 78 / 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 · 303 files examined
10 providers · runs locally · gateway support
Pinned models
gpt-6-astra released 2026-09-04 — 28 days old (from the public model catalogue)
Pin last edited 20 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
391,174 stars today
Overview
OpenClaw is the original open-source personal AI assistant: a self-hosted Gateway that runs on your own hardware and connects to the chat platforms you already use — Discord, iMessage, Slack, Teams, Telegram, WhatsApp, and 20+ more — plus native apps for macOS, iOS, Android, Windows, and Linux. State, memory, and credentials stay on your devices, while model backends (Claude, Codex, local models) are swappable plugins, so the assistant is never tied to a single provider.
Architecturally, OpenClaw follows a 'trusted gateway, untrusted execution, deterministic policy' model: one Gateway process can serve as a personal assistant on a laptop or as a shared team deployment, with configuration as the only difference. Privacy is a stated priority — the only default phone-home is a daily version check, anonymous feature stats are opt-in, and telemetry can be fully disabled. The project is stewarded by the OpenClaw Foundation, an independent 501(c)(3), with no paid tier, hosted service, or token.
Recent development shows a mature, high-velocity project: atomic updates with verified Gateway recovery, plugin hot reloading, worker startup and memory optimizations, local decision-model support via the TypeSafe plugin, and a public skill/plugin registry (ClawHub). Community sentiment is broadly positive but mixed on stability — Reddit threads praise its capability and ecosystem while some users report breakage after updates, reflecting the trade-off of its rapid release cadence and large feature surface.