WTH is OpenClaw?

Is it really that good?

Author

Ahmad Abugosh
February 13, 2026

WTH

You probably have heard about OpenClaw by now, but if not let me give you a quick rundown. 

OpenClaw is an open source (free to use) AI assistant tool that lets you create AI agents to automatically run tasks for you. 

How is this different from just using ChatGPT? 

In a few ways: 

  1. It has memory, similar to what you could do with MCPs and tools like n8n. However, unlike n8n which needs you to stitch everything together with triggers and actions (like Zapier), it all runs from one system in the background, and has both long and short term memory as well as of course RAG knowledge files.
     

  2. You can create “skills” which are basically things it can learn how to do as a repeatable process. For example, you can teach it to search the web for something and send you an email summary of what it finds, or create a thumbnail or social media caption for a video and it will know how to always do that task.

  3. Since it is open source, it is also very composable, which means that virtually any integration you can think of can work with it (Gmail, Outlook, Notion, Hubspot etc.). You can also give it full access to any of those tools or even your full laptop (which of course is a huge security risk if not done right)!

  1. You can create automated tasks (traditional cron jobs) that can run on regular intervals. For example, run this skill or task every morning at 9am, you could also make the trigger be push based (i.e do something if I get a new email or something else happens that is not time based).

  2. You assign it a “personality”, you can give it a name,  and backstory a purpose (basically you personify the agent).

  1. For me though, the biggest unlock is that you can chat with the agent about how it can improve itself or how to accomplish any task! That is the biggest difference I found between other similar agent libraries that I’ve used in the past (like ElizaOS for example), you can ask it how to do things. For example, I was having trouble connecting Gmail while hosting Openclaw on a VPS and it told me exactly what I needed to do to get it working and actually fixed itself. 

For my next post, I'll be going over how to set up things up securely and how you can get started with OpenClaw, even if you're a complete beginner.

Has anyone else here played around with OpenClaw? I’d be curious to hear from you! 

All the best,

Ahmad