An OpenClaw alternative, or a home for the OpenClaw you already run

When you'd look for an alternative

People who already run a self-hosted agent usually come to C5 for structure, not because something is broken. These are the needs C5 is built around.

• Finished deliverables — a multi-step job planned, staffed, checked and handed back as a document or publication-grade PDF.
• A team, not one agent — 200+ specialists across 17 divisions, working in parallel.
• Standing jobs with sign-offs — schedules that run on their own, and tasks that wait for your approval when you want them to.
• Spending you can see — a hard budget cap and a breakdown of cost by day, task and model.
• A full app — a board, dashboards, a library and settings in your browser.

C5 is the wrong fit if all you want is a chat-app gateway with no desktop app: it is built around its own app, and your gateway stays yours to run.

C5 and OpenClaw compared

OpenClaw changes quickly, and its own documentation is the authority on what it does today. What follows is what C5 builds in, so you can compare it with your setup.

• Orchestration — C5 writes a spec from your request, staffs specialists, runs them in parallel, checks each step and reworks what misses. See multi-agent orchestration.
• Schedules — one-off or repeating daily, weekly, monthly or yearly, with follow-up recipes after each task.
• Approvals and a killswitch — an autonomy dial, a human-in-the-loop window for sign-offs and blocked tool calls, and Stop within reach.
• Audit trail — a tamper-evident record of sign-ins, admin actions, security events and tool decisions.
• Budget gates — a hard cap per period that notifies you or blocks new work.
• Memory import — the ChatGPT Codex and Google Antigravity sessions on your machine, and Claude sessions when the Claude app is installed on the same computer, become searchable memory with nothing uploaded.
• Encrypted at rest — the database, files, history and keys stored encrypted on your disk.

Use both: OpenClaw as a C5 provider

Your gateway keeps running as it does today. C5 treats it as a provider, beside local runtimes and cloud models: it connects to the gateway and hands it task steps.

1. Keep your gateway runningStart OpenClaw as you normally do. C5 connects to its gateway; it does not install or replace it.
2. Open the OpenClaw cardIn C5, go to Settings › Integrations and turn on the OpenClaw card.
3. Set the gateway's addressEnter its Host and Port; C5's default is 127.0.0.1:18789. Or set OPENCLAW_GATEWAY_URL in c5.yaml or C5's environment, which wins over the card and locks its fields.
4. Save and set limitsSave the card. Then, under Settings › Access, set the OpenClaw gateway restrictions: which agent capabilities are allowed, which folders it may read and write, and which hosts it may reach.

• One variable, two readers — OPENCLAW_GATEWAY_URL is also what OpenClaw's own command-line tool reads, so a shell that exports it points both at the same gateway.
• Plain http and ws only — C5 ignores an https:// or wss:// gateway address rather than send the gateway's token unencrypted to an address you meant to be encrypted.
• Counts as local — steps an OpenClaw gateway serves count toward the Concurrent Agents allowance for local models and gateways, not the cloud one.
• Not for the classifier — a gateway passes each question to an agent that may use any model, so C5's built-in classifier cannot use it. Choose the model the gateway uses from that model's own provider instead.

Trying C5 without giving anything up

Moving over does not have to be a switch. Keep the gateway connected while you try C5's own specialists on a real job, and route work to whichever does it better. C5 is a local AI agent: the app, its encrypted database and its memory stay on your computer whichever provider does the thinking.

Privacy works the same whichever route a step takes: send it to a cloud model, directly or through your gateway, and that model's provider reads what was sent for that step. See what a private AI agent means, or compare C5 with cloud AI agents from the big model vendors.