OpenClaw

MIT-licensed, 389,200 stars, written by PSPDFKit founder Peter Steinberger.

What separates it from something like ChatGPT is where it runs. It installs on your own machine — curl -fsSL https://openclaw.ai/install.sh | bash, then openclaw onboard --install-daemon to configure the gateway — and lives in the background from then on. Send it a line in Telegram and it reads files, runs commands and calls external services on your computer, then replies in the chat window. Credentials and long-term memory are written to your own disk; there is no hosted layer.

The channel coverage is the unusual part. More than 50 integrations spanning chat apps, model providers, calendars and notes, music, smart home and automation tools. It does not ask you to open a dedicated app — it shows up in whichever messenger you already live in.

It also writes its own skills: when there is no ready-made tool for a job, it writes the code to add the capability, and it remembers your preferences.

To be clear about:

• You bring the model. OpenClaw charges nothing, but you decide what backs it. A cloud API is billed per token by the model provider; a local model served by Ollama costs nothing. "Free" describes this software, not the total cost of the arrangement.
• It holds very broad permissions. It reads your files, executes commands, signs into your chat accounts and writes its own code. That is why it is useful and also where the risk lives. Decide how wide to open the door before installing, and do not run your first experiment on a machine holding sensitive data or production credentials.
• No offline badge, for the same reason as Cline: the software runs offline, but whether the whole system does depends on whether your model is local or in the cloud.