Personal agent runtimes
Always-on, self-hosted agents you run as a daemon and talk to from chat apps: gateway runtimes, second brains, and self-improving assistants. The agent as a product you operate, not a library you build with.
| # | Project | Stars | Tier | OSS | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | OpenClaw typescriptmulti-agent | 390k | complex | ✅ | Self-hosted, always-on personal agent (formerly Clawdbot/Moltbot): a gateway + event-loop runtime that treats messages, heartbeats, crons, and webhooks as one input queue, persists state to local files, and lives in your chat apps (WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord). 13,700+ community skills; the fastest-growing repo in GitHub history. |
| 2 | Hermes memorypythonprovider-agnostic | 247k | slightly complex | ✅ | Nous Research's self-improving agent: a learning loop turns experience into reusable skills, builds a persistent user model across sessions, and checkpoints state to disk with rollback; lean enough for a $5 VPS, driven from chat, and model-agnostic (Nous Portal, OpenRouter, OpenAI, or any endpoint). |
| 3 | AnythingLLM ragtypescript | 66.3k | complex | ✅ | Self-hosted "AI second brain" **harness**: chat with your documents, run built-in agent skills (web search, code execution, browsing), and manage multi-user workspaces with a bundled vector DB, so there is no separate RAG stack to wire up. |
| 4 | nanobot mcpmemorylocalpython | 48.4k | mostly simple | ❓ | Ultra-lightweight, self-hosted personal agent framework: the **harness** is a Python daemon wiring tools, memory, and MCP into chat/webhook front ends (Telegram, Discord, web); minimal footprint alternative to heavier personal-runtime stacks. |
| 5 | CowAgent memorypython | 47.1k | slightly complex | ❓ | Self-hosted **harness** (formerly chatgpt-on-wechat) that plans tasks, runs tools/skills, and self-evolves via memory; multi-model, multi-channel (WeChat, Telegram, etc.), one-line install. |
| 6 | Khoj python | 37.4k | complex | ✅ | Self-hostable "AI second brain": answers over your docs and the web, custom agents, scheduled automations, and multi-client reach (web, Obsidian, Emacs, WhatsApp). A personal-agent harness with retrieval at the core. |
| 7 | Eliza memorymulti-agenttypescript | 19.4k | complex | ✅ | Open "agentic operating system" (elizaOS): persistent multi-agent runtime with character files, a plugin ecosystem, and social/platform integrations — the harness behind a large share of autonomous social agents. |
| 8 | Agent Zero memorymulti-agentbrowsersandboxpython | 19.2k | slightly complex | ❓ | Organic, prompt-defined personal agent framework: hierarchical sub-agents, persistent memory, browser and code tools, and self-modifying behavior; runs in Docker with a web UI. |
| 9 | OpenHarness (HKUDS) memorymulti-agent | 15.8k | complex | ✅ | Open agent harness with a built-in personal agent ("Ohmo") that runs across Feishu, Slack, Telegram, and Discord; core tool-use, skills, memory, multi-agent coordination with auto-compaction for multi-day sessions. |
| 10 | QM memorysandboxtypescript | 15.2k | complex | ✅ | Y Combinator's multiplayer agent **harness** for work, open-sourced from months of internal use: every person and room gets scoped memory, files, credentials, permissions, crons, web apps, and a durable sandbox; sessions, memory, and the work queue live in Postgres, sandboxes are a resource the agent reaches for rather than the place it lives, and Pi, OpenCode, Codex, or Claude Code can drive the same core. Slack and the web app are the shells. |
| 11 | OpenJarvis memorylocalpython | 10k | slightly complex | ✅ | Stanford Hazy Research's local-first personal AI **harness**: on-device model inference (Ollama built in), agent execution, memory, and learning as shared primitives, with on-demand, scheduled, and continuous agents and evaluations that count energy, latency, and dollars alongside accuracy; a cloud model can tune the local configuration once so run time stays on your own hardware. |
| 12 | AIlice sandboxpython | 1.4k | slightly complex | ✅ | Fully autonomous general-purpose agent; one binary, Docker-ready, for when you want "set goal and walk away" without a framework. |
| 13 | Talon mcpmemoryclitypescript | 83 | slightly complex | ✅ | Multi-platform personal agent living in Telegram, Discord, Teams, and the terminal. The **harness** is a pluggable-backend loop (Claude, Kilo, OpenCode, Codex, OpenAI Agents) with full MCP tool access and persistent background agents (Goals, Heartbeat, Dream); the chat apps are shells. |