OpenClaw and Perplexity Computer: Kortix is the open-source system

For one person, yes. OpenClaw is an open-source AI assistant that installs on a machine you own and answers in the channels you already use, with no vendor in the middle. For company work, no. Perplexity Computer's job is an agent that plans multi-step tasks in Perplexity's cloud, through Portable Computer on your own GPU machine, or with a local model on an Apple silicon Mac, and Kortix is what a team runs when the same work has to leave a record.

OpenClaw installs on the machine you own, and its README states the architecture in one paragraph:

OpenClaw is an open-source AI assistant that runs on your own computerand meets you in the channels you already use: Discord, iMessage, Slack,Teams, Telegram, WhatsApp, and 20+ more, plus native apps for macOS, iOS,Android, Windows, and Linux.One Gateway runs it as a personal assistant on a laptop or as a sharedteam deployment; configuration is the only difference.

Two sentences there settle the shape of the product. Channels are the interface, and one Gateway is the machine. Configuration is the only thing that separates a personal assistant on a laptop from a shared team deployment, and models or agent harnesses are plugins you swap without touching the rest. State, memory and credentials stay on your hardware, and the README names no paid tier and no hosted service.

The Gateway is also the limit. Every conversation runs through it, and the reply lands in the channel it came from, so the work arrives as a message and the record is the chat. A finished job is a reply. Nothing in that loop asks a second person to approve the work, and nothing leaves a branch behind for the next run to build on. A team that shares a Gateway shares one machine rather than a reviewed record of changes. For one person, that is a clean trade: one Gateway, on hardware you own, with the state on that disk.

Perplexity Computer is a hosted agent for multi-step work. Hand it an outcome and it cuts the work into tasks and sub-agents for research, documents, data and API calls, then runs each task in a sandbox with a filesystem and a browser. Access starts at Pro, with credits spent per Computer task rather than per seat. Two documented edges shape the product: a scheduled task fires no faster than once an hour, and a task pauses when the credit balance empties.

The local variant does not open the layer. Portable Computer launched on 25 August 2026 on the NVIDIA DGX Spark, with Linux as the first release and Windows support announced as coming, and reached Windows RTX PCs on 14 September 2026. It runs the same orchestrator, planner and scheduler on your own hardware while a Pro or Max plan stays required. On 15 October 2026 Perplexity published SPACE, the sandbox around each task, and the planner and the router above it stayed inside. You can read where the task runs and still not read what decides the next step.

Kortix keeps what a personal assistant leaves on a Gateway as a directory a team clones: each agent's prompt, the skills it loads, the memory the team builds up and the connectors it may call, all in a repository under version control. Two runs cannot overwrite each other's work, because each session gets its own machine and its own branch. Session work reaches main through a change request. Merge is default-deny for agents.

A self-hosted instance is one stack on a Linux server, and the install walkthrough takes it step by step. Model choice is a line in the project rather than a routing decision made for you: any model, your keys. The run ends, and the branch, the diff and the review stay.

Ask what arrives when the assistant finishes. OpenClaw leaves a message in a chat you were already reading, which is the right answer for one person who wants help in their own channels on their own machine. Perplexity Computer leaves a result inside a plan you rent, with credits spent and no branch to inspect. The limits of that arrangement are on the Perplexity Computer limitations page. Kortix leaves a change request against a repository your team owns.

The first two answers stay where the vendor or the chat put them. The third can be cloned, diffed and run again next quarter, by somebody who never saw the conversation that started it.