What OpenMausBot Is: A Chat App Where Every Contact Is an AI Agent
OpenMausBot is an open source alternative to the Grok Bot, and it rethinks what a chat app can be. It looks like Telegram, but every contact is a real AI agent. Each bot is a real person in the chat, with its own model, its own computer, its own apps, and its own memories. You message a bot the way you would message a friend, and it does the work: it opens apps, runs commands, browses the web, and comes back with a result. It is free and open source, written in TypeScript, licensed under Apache 2.0, and it has 20,971 stars. The idea is simple and a little strange at first: instead of opening ten different apps and ten different AI tools, you open one chat app and talk to a team of bots that each know how to do one job well.
Your Team of Bots: One Model, One Computer, One Job Each
Every bot in OpenMausBot is independent. A bot has its own model, its own computer, and its own apps, so two bots can disagree, work in parallel, or hand a task to each other. You can invite a bot into any chat with @name, and a bot can invite another bot. You can ask one bot to research a topic and another to write about it, and the first bot's result becomes the second bot's input. Bots can form teams from Markdown files, so you can set up a research team, a writing team, or a coding team and reuse it later. A directory of more than 100 bots comes built in, and you can build your own by writing a prompt and choosing the model, the tools, and the apps it may use. A bot can also start a conversation with you on its own, for example when it finishes a task or when it has a question that only you can answer.
What the Bots Can Actually Do: 500+ Apps, Approvals and Computer Use
The bots are not chatbots that only talk. They are agents with tools. They can run commands, use a browser, manage files, call APIs, search the web, and connect to more than 500 apps through Composio, including Slack, Gmail, Notion, GitHub, and Google Drive. They can also use a computer directly: click buttons, type, take screenshots, and operate any app on their own machine, which means they can do work in tools that have no API at all. Because a bot with a computer is powerful, the app asks for approval before a bot runs a command, installs software, or takes an action that changes something. You see the approval card, you decide, and the bot waits. The replies are grounded in the tools: when a bot says it booked a flight or filed a report, it shows the result, not just a claim. Before a bot sends a long reply, an AI Text Cleaner is a quick way to tidy up its draft, and an AI Proofreader catches the typos before the message goes out.
Local First: Your Data Stays on Your Machine
OpenMausBot is local first. The harness runs on your own machine at 127.0.0.1, and chat histories, memories, and state live in a folder on your computer, not on someone else's server. The bots' memories are local too, which matters when you are handing an agent your email, your files, and your accounts. You can run it entirely on your own machine, or host it on a server and connect from anywhere. The desktop app is built on Electron and is available for Mac, Windows, and Ubuntu, and the project also ships Docker images for the harness, the UI, and the agent runtime, so you can run it as a container if you prefer.
How to Get Started: Install, Sign In, Invite Your First Bot
Download the app for Mac, Windows, or Ubuntu from the releases page, or run it with Docker. Open it, sign in with the bot directory account, and you will see the bot directory with more than 100 bots ready to talk to. Invite one into a chat with @name and ask it for something small first, like researching a topic or summarizing a page, so you can see how it works and how the approval cards feel. Then build your own bot: give it a name, write a prompt that describes its job, pick a model, and choose which tools and apps it may use. Teams come from Markdown files, so once you have a team that works, save it and reuse it. The docs walk through the harness, the runtime, and the agent model in order, and the quick start is short enough to finish in an afternoon.
What You Need to Know Before You Install It
OpenMausBot is free and open source, but the bots are not free to run. A bot needs an AI model behind it, so you need Claude Code, Codex, or Grok installed and working, and you need the subscriptions those CLIs use. The app itself costs nothing, but the models bill as usual, and the README is clear that the project is not affiliated with xAI, Meta, OpenAI, or Manus. It is also not a crypto project: there is no official OpenMausBot token, and the README warns against tokens that claim to be one. Treat it as what it is, a free open source chat app for AI agents, and bring your own model subscriptions. If you already pay for Claude or Codex, the app turns that subscription into a team of bots you can talk to.
