Meta acquired Stilla on September 9, 2026. Axios broke the story that morning. The deal is pending close, nobody has disclosed a price, and Stilla’s team and technology are going into Meta Business Agent, the bot Meta sells to merchants on WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. Stilla’s founders posted the same day. “Stilla is continuing service and will remain the agent platform you rely on for mission critical work,” Siavash Ghorbani and Kaj Drobin wrote. “At Meta, our commitment is unchanged.”
Take them at their word, and still read this. If you searched for Stilla AI alternatives today you found G2 suggesting Databricks and a marketing blog comparing Stilla to GoHighLevel. Neither is the category. This page grades five agents that live in Slack against the bar Stilla itself documents, and says where each is worse than Stilla. We build one of the five, Chickpea. The scorecard comes from Stilla’s security docs, not ours.
Key takeaways
- Meta acquired Stilla on September 9, 2026, pending close, to build Meta Business Agent for merchants on WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. Stilla’s founders say service continues.
- Meta’s last workplace product, Workplace, was shut down on a schedule announced in May 2024 and deleted after May 2026, “so we can focus on building AI.” That is the reason to plan, not to panic.
- Stilla sets the bar. It enforces restriction policy in application code, keeps credentials out of model context, routes sandbox traffic through an egress proxy, and turns external actions into proposals. Judge any replacement on those four, then on Slack depth and who runs it.
- Chickpea clears all four on your own account. Viktor clears the ones it documents and adds Teams. Claude Tag, Hermes Agent, and OpenClaw each clear part of the bar and win somewhere else. The tables below say where.
- Most Stilla teams should change nothing this week and get two things in writing this month. The price of credits above the 40,000 base, and the 40-day deletion path.
Why look at alternatives if service continues
Because the buyer’s roadmap is not your roadmap, and each piece of evidence for that carries a date.
Meta bought a team for a merchant product. Meta Business Agent launched globally on June 3, 2026, answers customers from a product catalog, books appointments, and closes sales, and Meta says more than one million businesses use it. Its platform connects to “hundreds of systems like Shopify, Zendesk, and Shopee.” Linear and GitHub are not on that list, and Axios reports the acquisition is meant to accelerate exactly that product.
Meta has left workplace software before, on a schedule. Workplace, its Slack competitor since 2016, got its shutdown notice on May 14, 2024. Normal service ran through August 31, 2025, read-only access until May 31, 2026, and deletion after that. Meta’s stated reason was “so we can focus on building AI and metaverse technologies that we believe will fundamentally reshape the way we work.” Two years from notice to deletion is a fair planning window. It is also the only precedent we have, and it says nothing about Stilla in particular.
The third reason is smaller and already true. Stilla’s pricing page sells a Team plan at $40 per organization a month with a credit picker that starts at 40,000 credits. Stilla’s FAQ still describes a 14-day Pro trial, a read-only Free tier, and a Pro plan with “Unlimited agent actions.” Filip Konecny noticed the same mismatch on August 12 and called Stilla’s pricing “cheap if your team uses it, pointless if it doesn’t.” Neither page says what a credit buys. An acquisition is when questions like that get answered, usually by the pricing page.
What Stilla got right, and the bar it sets
Stilla’s prompt-injection page is the clearest governance write-up I have read in this category, and it is the right scorecard for anything that replaces it.
It starts from the assumption that the model will be fooled. “The model does not decide whether an operation is authorized. Stilla evaluates restriction policies in application code when the AI reads data, calls a tool, accesses the network, or executes a change proposal.” Four controls follow from that, and each one is a sentence you can check against another vendor’s docs.
| Control | What Stilla does | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Policy outside the model | Organization, group, and per-agent restriction policies, evaluated in code; an agent can narrow its user’s policy and never widen it | An injected instruction cannot argue with a policy it never reaches |
| Credentials outside the model | “Stored API keys, refresh tokens, and long-lived OAuth credentials are kept outside the model’s context”; native integrations authenticate on the server | A model that never holds a secret cannot be talked into printing one |
| Network egress control | Sandbox HTTP “passes through an authenticated egress proxy” that enforces an allowlist; curl and package managers cannot route around it | The classic exfiltration path, upload the file somewhere, is closed by default |
| Proposals before external actions | Sending, posting, editing a calendar, and creating an issue are change proposals; Slack Connect messages and external email recipients need a person unless a rule allows | The consequential action waits, and the wait is enforced in code |
| Slack depth | Mention @Stilla in a channel or thread; a different agent behavior per channel; every run is a stored, searchable canvas | The team can read what the agent did, in the run itself |
| Who runs it | Stilla, on Google Cloud in Belgium; SOC 2 Type II with zero findings, by its own report; Gemini, Claude, and third-party models under zero-retention terms | Your context and credentials live with the vendor, which is now Meta |
The first four rows are the bar. The last two are what a team adds when it shops.
How we picked these Stilla AI alternatives
Five agents a product or engineering team could put in Slack this week. Not marketing suites, not BI tools, not Slack replacements like Block’s Buzz, and not agents that live in their own app like xAI’s Grok Bot. Each of the five has a compare page on this site with its own dated register, and this post inherits those facts.
We ran Viktor’s onboarding and control room on August 2, 2026, and we run Chickpea every day, because we build it. We did not run Stilla. The trial needs an account, and every Stilla fact here comes from its published pages, checked September 9. If you run the $100 free trial and note what one mention costs in credits, that is the number nobody on this page has.
Quick comparison
| Option | Best for | Where it runs | Pricing model | Slack depth | License |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stilla | One shared teammate across Slack, Teams, GitHub, and Linear, with meeting notes | Stilla’s cloud (Google Cloud, EU) | $40 per org a month plus credits; 29 members max on Team | Mentions, per-channel agents, stored runs | Proprietary |
| Chickpea | Named teammates with separate accounts, on your own keys | Your Cloudflare account or your own Node host | Free software; you pay the provider and the host | Handles, threads, streamed replies, native tables, approvals in the thread | Apache 2.0 |
| Viktor | A hosted employee in Slack and Teams with deliverables | Viktor’s cloud | Credits from $50 for 20,000 | Threads and files; settings in a dashboard | Proprietary |
| Claude Tag | One Claude assistant for a team already on Claude Team or Enterprise | Anthropic’s cloud | Team seats plus tokens | Reads whole conversations, joins unprompted | Proprietary |
| Hermes Agent | One self-improving agent across twenty chat platforms | A box you keep up, or a cloud sandbox | Free software; you pay the host and the provider | Streaming, task cards, Bot Mode for specialist bots | MIT |
| OpenClaw | A personal agent with hands on a machine, any channel, local models | Your laptop or a server | Free software; you pay the host and the provider | One Slack app per named bot | MIT |
Against the bar
| Option | Policy outside the model | Credentials outside the model | Network egress control | Proposals before external actions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stilla | Yes, restriction policies in code | Yes, server-side | Yes, egress proxy with allowlist | Yes, change proposals; external recipients need a person |
| Chickpea | Yes, grants and saved instructions re-read at use; a gate that never consults the model refuses side effects the request did not name | Yes, the model picks a connection by ID and the secret is attached at egress | Yes, per-connector allowlists; the default policy has no domains; private ranges refused | Yes, send, delete, publish, and bulk changes wait for a person |
| Viktor | Partly, roles and approvals; the mechanism is not published | Yes, by Viktor’s account, the secret is attached server-side | Not published | Yes, sensitive actions pause for a person |
| Claude Tag | Partly, role-based control over who can invoke it and per-channel spend limits | Anthropic holds them; not published further | Not published | No, it can act, and join in, unprompted |
| Hermes Agent | Partly, an allowlist of Slack member IDs | On your box, in the process that runs the agent | Not published | No built-in gate on actions |
| OpenClaw | Partly, per-agent tool allow and deny lists; exec approvals are “guardrails for operator intent, not hostile multi-tenant isolation” | On the host, under the OpenClaw config directory | Not published; the docs tell you not to expose the gateway | Partly, exec approvals |
“Not published” means we looked and the vendor does not say. It is not a no.
Chickpea
Chickpea comes first because it clears all four controls and is the only option here that also keeps the runtime, the memory, and the credentials in an account you own. If you need Microsoft Teams, skip to Viktor.
What it is. Open source, Apache 2.0, deployed to your own Cloudflare account with a button or to a Node host you run. Each teammate is its own Slack handle with its own instructions, model, memory, connected accounts, repositories, skills, schedules, and channel grants. “Every connection belongs to one Agent for its lifetime,” so the finance teammate has the Stripe key and the support teammate does not, and no prompt can change that.
Where it is better than Stilla. The vendor in the middle is gone. Model traffic goes to the provider you pinned, on your key, at list price, with no credits: Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter, or Cloudflare Workers AI, which needs no key at all. Chickpea enforces the four controls the way Stilla does, in code. Grants and saved instructions are re-read at the moment of use, and “message text, retrieved content, and tool output are data, never permission.” The model never handles a secret. It picks a connection by ID, and Chickpea attaches the credential at egress, inside an allowlist that holds only that connector’s hosts, paths, and methods.
Underneath the model’s judgment sits a gate that does not consult it. During a Slack turn, Chickpea refuses any non-read call the current request did not name. Sending, deleting, publishing, and bulk changes wait for a person, and changes that widen a teammate’s reach come back into the thread as a proposal you approve. Stilla has one @Stilla with per-channel behaviors. Chickpea has a roster with per-teammate accounts, which is the difference between “the agent can read email” and “this teammate can read this inbox.”
Where it is worse than Stilla. It is Slack only, with no Teams and no meeting transcription. It ships 35 connector presets plus any HTTP API or MCP server, which is not “3,000+ tools.” There is no SOC 2, because self-hosted software inherits your compliance posture instead of shipping one. Named handles need a paid Slack plan and a workspace policy change. And you run it. Updates are a deploy you choose to run.
Who should pick it. Teams that want separate teammates with separate accounts, that would rather pay Anthropic or OpenAI directly than buy credits, and that want the evidence of every rule in the open source rather than in a vendor’s PDF.
Price. Nothing for the software. The Worker fits Cloudflare’s Workers Free plan; only the optional coding sandbox needs Workers Paid at $5 a month. The provider bill is whatever your teammates use, at list. Our pricing page shows the model at 25 people and three usage levels.
When I connect a teammate to Zendesk, the reply is a link locked to that one teammate and that one connector, expiring in 24 hours, and it finishes in the browser. Ask the teammate to send a customer a reply and it posts a preview and waits. That pause fired before any model decided anything about the reply.
Viktor
Viktor is the closest hosted like-for-like. It is a shared employee in Slack and Microsoft Teams, installed from the marketplace, paid in credits, and run by a vendor with SOC 2 Type 1 behind it.
What it is. One @Viktor per workspace, on Viktor’s private cloud, with 27 native integrations and a claimed 3,200 more through managed connectors. It hands back finished files, meaning PDFs, spreadsheets, presentations, and small web apps. Sensitive actions pause for a person. Since August 2026 you can add an OpenRouter key and pick your own model; otherwise Viktor picks and bills in credits.
Where it is better than Stilla. Files. Stilla’s docs describe canvases and proposals, not decks and PDFs. The install, too. On August 2 we went from a Slack sign-in to a working employee in a few minutes, through two Slack consent screens and no infrastructure. And Viktor publishes its credit ladder, which is more than Stilla’s pricing page gives you.
Where it is worse than Stilla. It is the same shape, a hosted vendor holding your context, so the question this week becomes “which vendor” rather than “whether.” One shared employee with no per-channel agent behaviors. Settings, integrations, and schedules live in a web dashboard rather than in Slack. The underlying model cost is not published; a quick task is 100 to 300 credits, which at the $50 tier is 25 to 75 cents.
Who should pick it. Teams on Microsoft Teams, teams that want files back, and teams that want a marketplace install with a compliance report and nothing to run.
Price. $50 a month for 20,000 credits, then $75 for 30,000, $100 for 40,000, $200 for 80,000, and $300 for 125,000. Our Viktor comparison has the ladder and the assumptions.
Claude Tag
Claude Tag is Anthropic’s own Slack agent, and it is the shortest path if your company already pays for Claude Team or Enterprise.
What it is. One @Claude for the whole company, under the organization’s identity, on Claude models, billed by the token on top of the plan. Slack only during the beta. It reads whole conversations rather than single mentions and decides when to join in.
Where it is better than Stilla. Zero operations, and Anthropic answers when it breaks. Conversation awareness, if you want an assistant that joins uninvited. And Claude Code. At Anthropic, Tag opens most of the company’s pull requests by handing work to Claude Code. Admins get role-based control over who can invoke it and per-channel spend limits.
Where it is worse than Stilla. It does not clear the bar. There is no built-in approval gate; it can act, and jump in, unprompted. One identity, one model vendor, no per-agent restriction policy in the sense Stilla documents. Needs Team, which starts at ten seats, or Enterprise.
Who should pick it. Engineering-heavy teams already on Claude Team that want one assistant this week and lean on Claude Code.
Price. Team seats plus metered tokens, on Anthropic’s list. Our Claude Tag comparison has the detail.
Hermes Agent
Hermes Agent is the open source agent whose Slack support goes deepest, and it is a personal agent at heart.
What it is. Nous Research’s MIT-licensed, self-improving agent. One install covers twenty chat platforms, with a Slack gateway that streams, posts task cards, and has a Bot Mode that builds a team of specialist bots with their own models and memory. Runs on Linux, macOS, WSL2, Docker, or a cloud sandbox.
Where it is better than Stilla. It learns. It writes its own skills as it works. Twenty platforms from one gateway, and a conversation can move between them. Any model endpoint, including Nous Portal. A $5 VPS is enough.
Where it is worse than Stilla. Access is an allowlist of Slack member IDs you maintain by hand, and there is no built-in gate on actions. The keys live in the process that runs the agent, on a box you keep up. It grows with one user; the workspace product is something you assemble.
Who should pick it. One engineer who wants one agent that follows them across Slack, Telegram, Discord, and WhatsApp and gets better over time, and is happy operating it.
Price. Free software; the host and the provider. Our Hermes comparison covers Bot Mode and the gateway.
OpenClaw
OpenClaw is the most popular open source agent there is, and its own security page says why it is a personal tool.
What it is. MIT, run by a non-profit foundation, one agent per gateway on your laptop or a server, connected to Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, and twenty-odd more channels, with hands on the machine it runs on.
Where it is better than Stilla. Every channel, local models, the largest community in the category, and it is free. People run it for companies, too. “We have multiple isolated OpenClaw instances serving as employee within Slack,” one engineer wrote on Hacker News in April.
Where it is worse than Stilla. Its security page says “everyone who can message a tool-enabled agent shares that agent’s delegated tool authority.” Credentials and OAuth tokens live under the OpenClaw config directory on the host, and isolation is a file permission. The docs describe exec approvals as “guardrails for operator intent, not hostile multi-tenant isolation.” Each named bot in Slack is its own Slack app with loop guards you write. Then there is the 2026 record, with CVE-2026-25253 in February, more than 30,000 exposed instances counted by Bitsight, and a supply-chain campaign against its skills registry. The same Hacker News thread had the other half of the team story: “except for the fact that my laptop has to be on.”
Who should pick it. Individuals. For the shared-agent problem, our OpenClaw for teams post walks through what breaks and four ways out.
Price. Free software; a small VPS at about $12 a month plus your provider.
When to stay on Stilla
I think most Stilla teams should stay this week, and many should stay this year.
Stilla says service continues, in writing, over the founders’ names. The deal has not closed, and nothing changes before it does. Stilla documents the four controls above more precisely than any of the five alternatives document theirs. None of the five publishes a rule for posting into Slack Connect channels or inviting external calendar attendees, and Stilla does.
The product is also ahead in places. Meeting notes with transcription in thirteen languages, Microsoft Teams, a desktop app, and a catalog Stilla puts at 3,000 tools are not things the open source options match. Stilla says more than 1,000 companies use it, and names Spotify, Ramp, and Legora. On Enterprise you get per-agent restriction policies, a draft mode where every action needs approval before you promote an agent to autonomy, sandbox network isolation with a block-all default available, and transcript retention you set at 24 hours, 30 days, 90 days, or a year.
Staying well means getting four things in writing.
- The price of credits above the 40,000 base. The picker on the pricing page runs to 40 million credits and shows no prices in the page itself, and no page says what a mention costs.
- Whether the Team plan and its 29-member cap survive. The thirtieth person is an Enterprise conversation today.
- The deletion path. Stilla’s FAQ says, “Remove your account to delete all indexed information from our systems within at most 40 days.” Your data is hosted in Belgium on Google Cloud, per the Slack Marketplace listing.
- Which page describes the plan you are on, the FAQ with its Pro trial or the pricing page with its credits.
With those four in hand, staying is a decision rather than a default.
How to choose
- Pick Chickpea if you want named teammates with separate accounts, your own model keys at list price, and the runtime in your own account, and Slack is your only chat tool.
- Pick Viktor if you need Microsoft Teams, want files back, and want a marketplace install with a compliance report and nothing to run.
- Pick Claude Tag if you already pay for Claude Team or Enterprise, want one assistant this week, and your engineers live in Claude Code.
- Pick Hermes Agent if one engineer wants one agent across many chat apps, self-improving, on a box they run.
- Pick OpenClaw if it is for you alone, with a local model, on your own machine.
- Stay on Stilla if meeting notes, Teams, and the enterprise controls are the point, and you get the four answers above in writing.
FAQ
Is Stilla AI shutting down after the Meta acquisition?
No, by Stilla’s account. The founders wrote on September 9, 2026 that “Stilla is continuing service and will remain the agent platform you rely on.” The deal is pending close. The precedent worth knowing is Meta’s Workplace, which got two years’ notice before deletion, and it is a precedent, not a prediction.
What did Meta buy Stilla for?
Meta Business Agent, according to Axios. That is the AI agent Meta offers merchants on WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, which launched globally on June 3, 2026 and which Meta says more than one million businesses use. Stilla’s team and technology join that effort when the deal closes, and Meta plans to expand its presence in Sweden.
How much does Stilla AI cost?
The pricing page lists a Team plan at $40 per organization a month with 40,000 credits, a credit picker that runs to 40 million, up to 29 members, and up to $100 in free credits without a card. Enterprise is on request and adds unlimited members, SAML SSO and SCIM, and audit logs. Prices for the higher credit tiers and the credit cost of a task are not published, and the FAQ still describes a Pro plan and a 14-day trial that the pricing page does not mention.
Does Stilla work in Slack and Microsoft Teams?
Yes. You mention @Stilla in Slack or Teams, and also in GitHub, Linear, and Discord, or email it. The Slack listing asks to view content and perform actions in channels and in the workspace. Of the alternatives here, Viktor works in Teams; Chickpea and Claude Tag are Slack only; Hermes and OpenClaw reach Teams as one channel among many.
Is there an open source alternative to Stilla?
Three here. Chickpea is Apache 2.0 and deploys to your own Cloudflare account or a Node host. Hermes Agent and OpenClaw are MIT and run on a machine you keep up. Chickpea is the one of the three that gates consequential actions and isolates credentials per teammate by default. The other two are personal agents you would govern yourself.
Can I bring my own API key to Stilla?
Stilla’s docs list a “Bring your own model credentials” page alongside its built-in models, which are Sonnet 5 by default, Opus 5, the GPT-5.6 family, GPT-6 Astra, Gemini 3.7 Flash, and Gemma 4. What the page allows we could not check; it did not resolve on September 9. Chickpea always uses your own key, across Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter, and Workers AI, and Viktor accepts an OpenRouter key.
What happens to my data if I leave Stilla?
Stilla’s FAQ says removing your account deletes all indexed information within at most 40 days. The Slack listing says data is stored in the EU, in Belgium on Google Cloud, encrypted in transit and at rest, and that model providers are under zero-retention agreements. Export what your agents built before you remove the account; the FAQ describes deletion, not export.
Sources
Stilla: Stilla is joining Meta (September 9, 2026), pricing, FAQ, prompt injection security, agents overview, built-in models, enterprise, security, Slack Marketplace listing (all checked September 9, 2026). The deal: Axios, Meta acquires Swedish AI startup Stilla.ai (September 9, 2026), MediaPost (September 9, 2026), Tech.eu on Stilla’s $5M pre-seed (January 20, 2026). Meta: Meta Business Agent (June 3, 2026), TechCrunch on the Workplace shutdown (May 14, 2024). Reviews and users: Filip Konecny, Stilla AI alternatives (August 12, 2026), mholubowski and atonse on Hacker News (April 15, 2026). Alternatives: Chickpea vs Viktor, Chickpea vs Claude Tag, Chickpea vs Hermes Agent, Chickpea vs OpenClaw (verified September 4, 2026), OpenClaw alternatives for teams (September 8, 2026). Chickpea: security model, authority and confirmation, what an Agent is, models and providers, requirements and costs (verified September 4 to 8, 2026), pricing.
Facts checked September 9, 2026, the day the acquisition was reported. Stilla’s pricing and plan lineup are the rows most likely to move. We re-check the register behind this page at 30 days and every 90 after.