OpenClaw
OpenClaw is the most popular self-hosted AI agent framework. You host it on your own machine or VPS, choose your model provider, connect channels (Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, Slack and more), and extend it with skills. Every guide on this hub is independently researched and annotated — we link back to creators and original sources.
Guides
What Is OpenClaw?
OpenClaw is a personal AI assistant runtime that you host on your own machine or VPS. Unlike hosted products (ChatGPT, Claude Cowork), OpenClaw gives you control over which model provider answers your questions, which channels reach the agent, and which skills your agent can run.
The gateway routes incoming messages to the right agent, applies allowlist rules, and isolates sessions per sender. A user can start with a Claude backend, swap to a local Ollama model mid-project, and keep the same skills and conversation history. The skill ecosystem — via ClawHub — ranges from "get the weather" to "manage GitHub PRs" to "rebalance DeFi positions."
If you've used ChatGPT or Claude and wished you controlled the plumbing, OpenClaw is the direct answer. Compare it with similar agents: IronClaw (NEAR AI’s security-first agent, rebuilt in Rust), NemoClaw (NVIDIA’s sandboxed reference stack for running OpenClaw), or see the full comparison table on the homepage.
At a Glance
| License | MIT (free, open source) |
| Install | npm install -g openclaw |
| Requires | Node 24.22.1+ or 26.12.1+ (Node 26 recommended; the install docs list 24.16+ / 26.1+ as the minimum) |
| Channels | WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, iMessage, email, and more |
| Model providers | Anthropic, OpenAI, Ollama (local), and any OpenAI-compatible API |
| Official skills | Bundled skills ship with OpenClaw; there is no separate "official" catalogue (see finding & vetting skills) |
| Community skills | ClawHub community registry (third-party: read before installing) |
| Typical monthly cost | ~$7 (cheap model) to ~$20 (typical) — full breakdown |
OpenClaw Use Cases — Real-World Setups
Concrete things people actually build with OpenClaw, with full setup steps and cost breakdowns.
- Morning brief — daily 7am email + calendar + news digest delivered to Telegram
- Family calendar coordinator — one agent watches everyone's schedule
- Daily journal with mood tracking — privacy-first, runs locally
- Code review automation — PR triage with style + correctness checks
- Dependency updater — weekly npm/pip refresh with changelog summary
- All 12 use cases →
OpenClaw Troubleshooting — Common Errors
The errors people actually hit on day 1 — with copy-paste fixes.
- npm EACCES on global install — don't use sudo with npm
- Gateway failed to start — port in use — find and free the bound process
- Rate limit 429 (Anthropic provider) — backoff and retry strategy
- All troubleshooting entries →
OpenClaw Security — What to Harden First
Self-hosted OpenClaw runs as your OS user with default-allow skills. These are the controls that matter most.
- Skill & tool allowlisting — the single highest-impact control
- Secrets & credentials — never in SOUL.md, always in .env
- Sandboxing — contain the blast radius of an agent mistake
- Prompt injection — the #1 vulnerability for any agent that reads wide
- 15-minute hardening checklist — the OpenClaw-specific essentials
Related on This Site
- IronClaw — NEAR AI’s Rust-based, security-first agent with skill allowlisting and sandboxed defaults
- NemoClaw — OpenClaw on NVIDIA OpenShell, containerised and policy-controlled
- Decision guide — pick the right agent for your use case
- Weekly News Digest — OpenClaw releases, CVEs, and community updates every Monday
Official sources
Checked against the OpenClaw docs, release 2026.9.7. If anything here disagrees with these pages, trust the vendor docs.
Latest OpenClaw News
Recent releases, tutorials, and video summaries:
Your agent can pay: six attacks on x402 payments (price swap, duplicate payment IDs, free shopping, cache, look-alike sellers, prompt injection) and the fix for each
Claude Code effort levels tested: the same Opus 5.5 build at low, medium, high, extra high and max
Telling Claude to "make it better" 100 times: the exact prompt, a clean-room setup, and where Sonnet and Opus 5.5 started overbuilding
Qwen Audio Agent as a voice front end for Claude Code: install, config.env, gateway, and what interruption and cancel really do