AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to OpenShears – I built an uninstaller because OpenClaw refuses to die
Hey HN, I've been using OpenClaw for a few months as my local LLM gateway. It was genuinely fun — the convenience of routing multiple models through a single endpoint is hard to beat. But along the way, I stumbled upon a few surprises that made me uncomfortable: - Config files scattered in unexpected places (~/.openclaw, ~/.clawdbot, and more) - Background processes that respawn after termination - Logs that quietly accumulate without rotation - Cached data persisting long after I thought I'd removed it None of this is necessarily malicious, but when I decided to move on, I wanted…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
I’ve been running Clawdbot for the last couple weeks and have genuinely found it useful but running it scares the crap out of me. OpenClaw has 52+ modules and runs agents with near-unlimited permissions in a single Node process. NanoClaw is ~500 lines of core code, agents run in actual Apple containers with filesystem isolation. Each chat gets its own sandboxed context. This is not a swiss army knife. It’s built to match my exact needs. Fork it and make it yours.
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2
ClawSimple▲113Hi HN, I’ve been following the OpenClaw project and noticed frictions for non-expert users: most discussions and docs are too nerdy... Installing OpenClaw costs lots of brain cells. Uninstalling costs even more! Besides, security/privacy risks exist for non-technical users. So I built ClawSimple, a tool that make deploy and run your own OpenClaw-based assistant easier. With ClawSimple you can: - Spin up one or multiple OpenClaw robots in a few minutes; - Focus on using the assistant instead of wrestling with deployment details. For people who don’t want to pay for a managed service, I…
Feb 2026 · clawsimple.com · its alternatives →
- 3
I’ve been cautiously (and nervously) playing with openclaw and a number of other claw and code agents for a while now, but trying out different ones was tricky so I wanted a simple way to switch out channel ownership… then I wanted more. Security is hard, and I wanted to make it easier. This is FAR from polished, and no claims that I’m a “security expert” but I tried to think and research a bit on different threat models (I think of 2 broad ones for agents, external adversaries and internal agentic failures) and try and offer best in class protection on both, while also not having any…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 4
Hey HN! I've been wanting to use something like OpenClaw for a while but couldn't get myself to give it access to anything important due to all the risks involved. Prompt injection is still a problem (even though some people seem to ignore it) and so are hallucinations and mishaps that cause agents to do things like delete production data [1]. Even harnesses like Claude Code and Codex are subject to this, particularly since we're getting progressively looser about how we run them e.g. Conductor is really popular and runs agents without any sandboxing. That means we're in a bit of an…
Apr 2026 · agentport.sh · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, I'm Daniel, solo dev from Germany. I built ClawHosters (https://clawhosters.com), a managed hosting platform for OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent framework. Quick timeline: domain registered February 5th. First paying customer six days later. I probably should have spent more time on it, but it works. If you haven't seen OpenClaw, it lets you run a personal AI assistant that connects to Telegram, Discord, Slack, and WhatsApp. Self-hosting it is absolutely possible, but it's a pain. You're dealing with Docker setup, SSL certs, port forwarding, security hardening, keeping…
Feb 2026 · clawhosters.com · its alternatives →
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Zero-config hosting to launch specialized AI teams instantly
Feb 2026 · yourclaw.cloud · its alternatives →
- 8
Hi HN, I’ve been using OpenClaw daily since it dropped in November. I love the agency it provides, but as I started giving it more production API keys and access to my local filesystem, I realized the threat model was essentially "hope-based." We ran an experiment to see how resilient a standard OpenClaw setup was to prompt injection. Within 2 mins, we were able to exfiltrate active session tokens and API credentials through the chat interface. The problem is fundamental: in most agent architectures, the LLM logic and the sensitive credentials live in the same process space. If the agent is…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9
People seem to be blindly hooking up their OpenClaw’s to their personal data. So, I built runtime controls to prevent at the least, very simple prompt injection attacks. Once installed, it hooks to Node.js child_process module in the gateway process and listens to tool calls and their response streams. And a fetch hook to monitor user prompts (both could’ve been through fetch, happy to discuss why this whole layer couldn’t just be a proxy). There are two layers of protection: First: Whenever there is a read-only tool call whose response an attacker can modify, we extract that part of the…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10
The Setup: I built 3 apps in 2025. Spent months on each. Made $0 total. I was about to give up on indie hacking. The Opportunity: Then OpenClaw (self-hosted AI assistant) went viral in January. My entire Twitter feed exploded with it. Hundreds of people trying it, struggling with setup. I saw the pattern: massive interest + technical barrier = opportunity. What I Built: ClawdHost – managed hosting for OpenClaw. Think Heroku but specifically for this one AI assistant. Lets see how this one goes!
Feb 2026 · clawdhost.net · its alternatives →
- 11
I built DevClaw, an OpenClaw plugin that turns each Telegram group into an isolated, autonomous dev team: planner/orchestrator, DEVs, and QA all running on their own. I use it for all my development now. Issues on GitLab/GitHub are the single source of truth, and three things compound to save around 70% on tokens: model tiering (Haiku for typos, Opus for architecture), session reuse across tasks, and token-free scheduling that burns zero LLM calls for orchestration. Please try it and give some feedback. Also keen to hear from anyone running autonomous coding agents, especially what…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12IM
As a handsome local AI enjoyer™ you’ve probably noticed one of the big flaws with LLMs: It lies. Confidently. ALL THE TIME. I’m autistic and extremely allergic to vibes-based tooling, so … I built a thing. Maybe it’s useful to you too. The thing: llama-conductor llama-conductor is a router that sits between your frontend (eg: OWUI) & backend (llama.cpp + llama-swap). Local-first but it should talk to anything OpenAI-compatible if you point it there (note: experimental so YMMV). LC is a glass-box that makes the stack behave like a deterministic system, instead of a drunk telling a story about…
Jan 2026 · its alternatives →
- 13
The AI that really does things. Any OS. Any Platform. The lobster way. 🦞 - GitHub - openclaw/openclaw: The AI that really does things. Any OS. Any Platform. The lobster way. 🦞
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, I’m the creator of Cordum. I’ve been working in DevOps and infrastructure for years (currently in the fintech/security space), and as I started playing with AI agents, I noticed a scary pattern. Most "safety" mechanisms rely on system prompts ("Please don't do X") or flimsy Python logic inside the agent itself. If we treat agents as autonomous employees, giving them root access and hoping they listen to instructions felt insane to me. I wanted a way to enforce hard constraints that the LLM cannot override, no matter how "jailbroken" it gets. So I built Cordum. It’s an open-source…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16
Clawsify▲16Hi HN, I’ve been experimenting with OpenClaw recently and started building a small project called Clawsify. The idea is simple: instead of one generic AI agent, create different agents and personas tailored for specific niches. For example: marketing agents research agents automation/task agents niche-specific personas depending on the workflow I’m also experimenting with different OpenClaw tools and boilerplates so builders can spin up agents faster without setting everything up from scratch. Still early and mostly experimental, but I’m curious: What kind of niche AI agents or personas…
Mar 2026 · clawsifyai.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Hi HN, I’m building ClawDeploy for people who want to use OpenClaw but don’t have a technical background. The goal is simple: remove the setup friction and make deployment approachable. With ClawDeploy, users can: - get a server ready - deploy OpenClaw through a guided flow - communicate with the bot via Telegram Target users are solo operators, creators, and small teams who need a dedicated OpenClaw bot but don’t want to deal with infrastructure complexity. Would love your feedbacks :)
Feb 2026 · clawdeploy.com · its alternatives →
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I built a skill library for OpenClaw (always-on AI agent runtime, not session-based) where the agent can teach itself new behaviors during normal conversation. The idea: you tell your agent "every time I ask for a code review, always check for security issues first." It invokes a create-skill skill, writes a new SKILL.md, and that behavior is live immediately — no restart, no config change, no developer required. What I think is actually useful (the safety cluster): • loop-circuit-breaker: OpenClaw retries ALL errors identically. This halts on the 2nd identical failure before it burns your…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20
Hi HN, Matvey, Ildar, Joey, and Dominik here. If you're building LLM agents that use tools, you're probably worried about prompt injection attacks that can hijack those tools. We were too, and found that solutions like prompt-based filtering or secondary "guard" LLMs can be unreliable. Our thesis is that agent security should be handled at the network level between the agent and the LLM, just like a traditional web application firewall. So we built Archestra Platform: an open-source gateway that acts as a secure proxy for your AI agents. It's designed to be a deterministic firewall against…
2025 · archestra.ai · its alternatives →
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Dedicated *Secure* OpenClaw VPS - LLM credits included
Feb 2026 · easyclawd.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Scan every LLM API call for PII and injection attacks
Jun 2026 · secure-mind-live.github.io · its alternatives →
- 23OS
Hello HN, I’ve been building AI agents lately and ran into a common "Context Bloat" problem. When an agent has 20+ skills, stuffing every system prompt, reference doc, and tool definition into a single request quickly hits token limits and degrades model performance (the "lost in the middle" problem). To solve this, I built OpenSkills, an open-source SDK that implements a Progressive Disclosure Architecture for agent skills. The Core Concept: Instead of loading everything upfront, OpenSkills splits a skill into three layers: Layer 1 (Metadata): Light-weight tags and triggers (always loaded…
Jan 2026 · its alternatives →
- 24
wsgrok▲7I built it for myself because ngrok didn't let me add one more domain unless I paid $12 more. I probably should've looked for alternatives before building my own, but my grudge got in the way . Once I started, I wanted to make it better than the other options. Silly, I know. No one probably cares. I plan to open source it sometime next year because I’ve got other projects to finish first. It's free until I deplete my cloud credits, then it will switch to a tier-based model with a free option.
Jan 2026 · wsgrok.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- NanoClaw – “Clawdbot” in 500 lines of TS with Apple container isolation alternatives
- ClawSimple alternatives
- Zeroclawed: Secure Agent Gateway alternatives
- AgentPort – Open-source Security Gateway For Agents alternatives
- MOLTRON for OpenClaw alternatives
- I built managed OpenClaw hosting with 60s provisioning in 6 days alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →