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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Rivet – open-source AI Agent dev env with real-world applications

We just launched Rivet, the open-source visual AI programming environment! We built Rivet, because we were building complex AI Agent applications at Ironclad. It unlocked our abilities here, and we're excited to make available to the entire community. Backstory: A few months ago, inspired by things like LangChain and LlamaIndex, we started building an AI agent that could work with legal contracts. Unfortunately, we couldn't just use retrieval augmented generation (RAG), because a lot of contracts are basically identical (many chunks with near-identical embeddings), except for a few key…

Rivet is an open-source visual programming environment for building AI agents. Developed at Ironclad for creating complex agent applications, it provides a graphical interface for designing and debugging AI workflows.… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Rivet – open-source AI Agent dev env with real-world applications launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    Open-source visual AI programming environment from Ironclad

    2023 · rivet.ironcladapp.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Hey HN! Rivet is an OSS game server management tool that enables game developers to easily deploy their dedicated servers without any infra experience. We recently open-sourced Rivet after working on it for the past couple of years. I wanted to share some of my favorite things about our experience building this with the HN community. My cofounder and I have been building multiplayer games together since middle school for fun (and not much profit [1]). In HS, I stumbled into building the entire infrastructure powering [Krunker.io](http://Krunker.io) (acq by FRVR) & other popular…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Hello! We posted a Show HN for Rivet last year for our container orchestration project (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37188659). In that time, a lot has changed that I think HN will find interesting. Rivet is open-source actor infrastructure similar to Cloudflare's Durable Objects. Rivet itself already serves millions of MAU in production using our current container runtime – primarily for multiplayer games – and Rivet Actors are a new extension to support actor-like workloads. Rivet Actor's core primitives are RPC, state, and events. Actors are powered by Rust, V8…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    OpenAgents - The collaboration OS for AI agents. Contribute to openagents-org/openagents development by creating an account on GitHub.

    Apr 2026 · open-agents.dev · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    The designer for your AI agents (Openclaw, CC, Codex)

    Mar 2026 · lokuma.ai · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Hi HN! We just launched Verdent, an AI coding agent that actually plans before it codes, tests its own work, and delivers production-ready results without you having to clean up after it. tl;dr Check out the website [1] and read the story [2] - The problem: Current AI tools dump code and leave you to debug. You ask for "build a login endpoint" and get a passwordless JWT mess that doesn't fit your project. We've talked to hundreds of engineers who are frustrated with having to micromanage AI output. - What we built: Verdent works more like a senior engineer. It asks clarifying questions…

    2025 · verdent.ai · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Open-source, secure environment with real-world tools for enterprise-grade agents. - e2b-dev/E2B

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Data visualizations are the bridge between user and data. But building AI agents that can generate visualizations reliably can be very tricky: - simple chart specs can be reliable, but generated charts are often of low quality due to reliance on system defaults; - complex chart specs with explicit details can produce good-looking charts, but they are verbose and agents can struggle with reliability We figured out it is a limitation on the language issue (not just AI capability thing) -- current visualization languages are a bit too low-level for AI agents, requiring them to explicitly make…

    Jul 2026 · microsoft.github.io · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Hello HN, I don't post on here much, but wanted to get some eyes on a new project I'm just launching. I think we definitely need one more AI code agent.. I'm a long-term C++ dev, and over 30+ years I've created some successful audio dev tools (JUCE, the Tracktion DAW, the Cmajor DSP language). All of these came from me getting annoyed with something I had to use, and deciding to have a go at my own take on whatever it was. So Juggler is my attempt at an AI code agent, after spending too many hours loving what the models could do, but hating the CLI experience, and having some opinions of…

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Hi HN, I've been building Lukan, an open-source (MIT) agentic workstation that runs entirely as a single Rust binary with zero runtime dependencies. I started this because I wanted a unified workstation optimized for my own productivity. My goal was to build an environment where I could securely remote into my machine from anywhere, seamlessly view and modify local files, and run AI agents or drop into a terminal side-by-side, all integrated with a rich set of built-in tools. Here is what makes it different: Multi-agent sessions: Run multiple agents in parallel, each with its own isolated…

    Apr 2026 · lukan.ai · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Hey HN! Wanted to show our open source agent harness called Gambit. If you’re not familiar, agent harnesses are sort of like an operating system for an agent... they handle tool calling, planning, context window management, and don’t require as much developer orchestration. Normally you might see an agent orchestration framework pipeline like: compute -> compute -> compute -> LLM -> compute -> compute -> LLM we invert this so with an agent harness, it’s more like: LLM -> LLM -> LLM -> compute -> LLM -> LLM -> compute -> LLM Essentially you describe each agent in either a self contained…

    Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    I've been building computer-use tools for a while, and I quietly launched this about a month ago (122 Stars on GH). I figured it was worth sharing here. Over the last few months, a lot of computer-use agents have come out: Codex, Claude Code, CUA, and others. Most of them seem to work roughly like this: 1. Take a screenshot 2. Have the model predict pixel coordinates 3. Click x,y 4. Take another screenshot 5. Repeat That works, but it's slow, expensive in tokens, and fragile. If the UI shifts a few pixels, things break. And the model still doesn't know what any element actually is. But the…

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13
    VEXI▲94

    Open-source AI coding agent for your terminal

    Jun 2026 · vexi.pro · its alternatives →

  14. 14
    Atomic▲140

    Hey HN, I’ve been building Atom (https://github.com/rush86999/atom), an open-source, self-hosted AI automation platform. I built this because while tools like OpenClaw are excellent for one-off scripts and personal tasks, I found them difficult to use for complex business workflows (e.g., managing invoices or SaaS ops). The main issue was State Blindness: the agent would fire a command and assume it worked, without "seeing" if the UI or state actually updated. I just shipped a new architecture to solve this called Canvas AI Accessibility. The Technical Concept: Instead of…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Hi! I’m Nathan: an ML Engineer at Mozilla.ai: I built agent-of-empires (aoe): a CLI application to help you manage all of your running Claude Code/Opencode sessions and know when they are waiting for you. - Written in rust and relies on tmux for security and reliability - Monitors state of cli sessions to tell you when an agent is running vs idle vs waiting for your input - Manage sessions by naming them, grouping them, configuring profiles for various settings I'm passionate about getting self-hosted open-weight LLMs to be valid options to compete with proprietary closed models. One…

    Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    🔥 Open Source Browser API for AI Agents & Apps. Steel Browser is a batteries-included browser sandbox that lets you automate the web without worrying about infrastructure. - steel-dev/steel-browser

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Hey HN! We posted Rivet Actors here previously [1] as an open-source alternative to Cloudflare Durable Objects. Today we've released SQLite storage for actors (Apache 2.0). Every actor gets its own SQLite database. This means you can have millions of independent databases: one for each agent, tenant, user, or document. Useful for: - AI agents: per-agent DB for message history, state, embeddings - Multi-tenant SaaS: real per-tenant isolation, no RLS hacks - Collaborative documents: each document gets its own database with built-in multiplayer - Per-user databases: isolated, scales…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Open-source body for the AI agent you already run

    14d ago · opencharm.dev · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    13,000+ MCP servers, skills & plugins for AI coding agents

    Jul 2026 · codexmarketplaces.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Open-source AI agent runtime — build Agents in plain English

    Jul 2026 · syntheticbrew.ai · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    We recently started to use agents to update some documentation across our codebase on a weekly basis, and everything quickly turned into cron jobs, logs, and terminal output. it worked, but was hard to tell what agents were doing, why something failed, or whether a workflow was actually progressing. We thought it would be more interesting to treat agents as long-lived workers with state and responsibilities and explicit handoffs. Something you can actually see and reason about, instead of just tailing logs. So we built Clawe, a small coordination layer on top of OpenClaw that lets agent…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Hey HN, A few months ago, I tried to automate some of my work with the popular AI agent OpenClaw, and then I quickly realized how difficult it is to get it to work with APIs and third-party services securely, which is essential for a lot of work-related tasks. Then I realized OpenClaw is more of a personal assistant and it was not designed to get actual work done as a coworker. So I started to build Valmis, an alternative to OpenClaw that works with more than 100 apps and services, with security being the priority. Valmis addresses the security issue by designing a proxy system: dockerized…

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    I'm Josh, founder of Synth. We've been working on coding agent optimization with method like GEPA and MIPRO (the latter of which, I helped to originally develop), agent evaluation via methods like RLMs, and large scale deployment for training and inference. We've also worked on patterns for memory, processing live context, and managing agent actions, combining it all in a single stack called Horizons. With the release of OpenAI's Frontier and the consumer excitement around OpenClaw, we think the timing is right to release a v0. It integrates with our sdk for evaluation and optimization but…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Hi HN, we're Kiran and Vijay! Over the past two years, we have built a columnar storage engine for observability: logs, metrics, and traces. Today, it's exciting for us to show what we've built on top of that foundation: LLM Agent Observability. Given how non-deterministic agents are, storing all traces without sampling was critical for us. But these traces tend to be in the MBs, sometimes GBs - we needed to store them inexpensively. We also needed the queries and analyses to be fast. To meet both these goals, we store them in S3 in our own parquet-like file format, and query them using AWS…

    Jul 2026 · oodle.ai · its alternatives →

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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 →