AgentsOpenClaw
A free, open-source personal assistant you text from your phone, running on your own computer. A free, open-source (MIT) personal AI assistant that runs on your own Mac, Windows or Linux computer and that you message from WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Signal, iMessage and other chat apps. It can use cloud models or local models through Ollama. It was previously known as Clawdbot.
✓ Last verified October 15, 2026 from official sourcesFree and open source (MIT). There is no subscription or paid edition; you pay only for any cloud model you connect. Local models through Ollama cost nothing to run.
People who want a 24/7 assistant they can text from their phone. Running a personal agent on your own hardware with local models.
Runs on your machine and keeps its state there. With a local model nothing is sent to a model provider. It can take real actions, so start sandboxed. Skill level: Intermediate.
What it's great at
- Inbox, calendar and reminder chores from chat
- Running fully local with an Ollama model
What it can do
- Desktop apps for macOS 15+, Windows 10/11 and Linux install everything for you, or use the one-line installer
- Persistent memory, skills and plugins, scheduled jobs and reminders
- Browses the web, fills forms, reads and writes files and runs shell commands, with full access or sandboxed
- Local models via Ollama: pick "Local only" during onboarding, or run "ollama launch openclaw"
Example tasks to try
- From WhatsApp: "Every weekday at 8am, send me my calendar and anything urgent in my inbox."
Start in 5 minutes
- Install Ollama from ollama.com/download and pull a tool-capable model, e.g. "ollama pull gemma4"
- Download the OpenClaw desktop app from openclaw.ai (or run "ollama launch openclaw")
- In onboarding choose Ollama, then "Local only"
- Start sandboxed and connect one chat app
Go to OpenClaw Foundation's official page →
Watch out for
It can act on your files, email and shell. Keep it sandboxed until you trust a task, and give local models at least a 64K context.
Compare it
- Personal agents compared: ChatGPT agent vs Muse vs Grok Bot vs Manus
- Local personal agents: OpenClaw vs Hermes Agent (and how they compare with cloud agents)
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Official sources
- OpenClaw official site
- OpenClaw install docs
- OpenClaw docs: Ollama
- Ollama docs: OpenClaw
- OpenClaw on GitHub
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