---
title: "Chickpea vs Claude Tag: Slack AI teammates compared"
description: "Claude Tag is one @Claude on Anthropic models, on a Team or Enterprise plan. Chickpea is open source, gives you many named teammates, any model, and runs on your own account."
canonical: https://chickpea.co/compare/claude-tag
author: Pejman Pour-Moezzi (https://x.com/pejmanjohn)
verified: 2026-09-04
---

# Chickpea vs Claude Tag

> One @Claude on one vendor, or a team of named teammates on infrastructure you own.

By Pejman Pour-Moezzi, creator of Chickpea. Facts checked against the sources on September 4, 2026. The HTML page is at https://chickpea.co/compare/claude-tag; the full site index for agents is at https://chickpea.co/llms.txt.

**Claude Tag** (Anthropic): Anthropic's own Slack agent. One @Claude for the whole company, on Claude models, billed by the token on a Team or Enterprise plan.

**Chickpea**: an open source Slack app that gives a workspace named AI teammates, each with its own handle, instructions, memory, connected accounts, schedules, and model, deployed to your own Cloudflare account or a Node host.

## The short version
Claude Tag puts Anthropic's models in Slack with almost no setup, and Anthropic runs it. The trade is that you get one identity, one model vendor, and a token bill that only goes up. Chickpea gives you as many named teammates as you have jobs, on whichever model each job deserves, deployed to an account you own.

If you are already on Claude Team or Enterprise and want one general assistant, Tag is the shorter path. If you want a support teammate, an oncall teammate, and a revops teammate with separate accounts, separate memory, and separate models, Chickpea is built for that.


### Choose Claude Tag if
- You already pay for Claude Team or Enterprise and want one assistant in Slack this week.
- You want Anthropic to run the infrastructure and take the operational risk.
- Your team is engineering-heavy and leans on Claude Code, which Tag hands off to.

### Choose Chickpea if
- You want several teammates with their own handles, accounts, and memory.
- You want to pick the model per teammate, or switch vendors without switching products.
- You want the runtime, the memory, and the credentials in your own cloud account.
- You want consequential actions to wait for a person, by default.

## Side by side

| Criterion | Chickpea | Claude Tag |
|---|---|---|
| Works inside Slack | Yes. Slack is the product: channels, threads, DMs. | Yes. Slack only during the beta. |
| Several named teammates | Yes. Each teammate has its own handle, instructions, memory, and model. | No. One @Claude under the organization's identity. |
| Open source | Yes. Apache 2.0. | No. Proprietary, hosted by Anthropic. |
| Runs on your infrastructure | Yes. Your Cloudflare account, or Node on your own host. | No. Runs on Anthropic's infrastructure. |
| Your own model keys | Yes. Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter, or Workers AI with no key at all. | No. Usage is billed to the Anthropic plan. |
| Choice of model provider | Yes. Four providers, pinned per teammate. | No. Anthropic models only. |
| No seats, no markup | Yes. No seats, no credits. You pay the provider and Cloudflare directly. | No. Needs Team (10+ seats) or Enterprise, then tokens on top. |
| Managed from Slack | Yes. Create and change teammates by asking @Chickpea. Secrets finish in the browser. | Partly. Owners provision it and connect tools from the admin side. |
| Asks before consequential actions | Yes. Sending, deleting, publishing, and bulk changes wait for a person. | Not built in. It can act, and jump in, unprompted. |
| Accounts connected per teammate | Yes. 35 connector presets plus HTTP APIs and MCP servers, connected to one teammate each. | Partly. Tools are connected once by an admin, for the one Claude. |
| Scheduled work | Yes. Recurring or one-time, created in Slack, posted to a channel. | Partly. It picks up tasks over time; no schedule you set in Slack. |
| Streaming, tables, live status | Yes. Streamed replies, native tables, task rows, live status, a signed footer. | Partly. Replies in threads; reads whole conversations. |

## What a 25-person team pays a month

Estimates from published prices. A request is one mention that reads a thread, maybe calls a tool, and answers.

| Usage | Requests a month | Chickpea | Claude Tag on Claude Team |
|---|---|---|---|
| Light, 5 a person a week | 541 | $37 | $706 |
| Medium, 20 a person a week | 2,165 | $135 | $950 |
| Heavy, 50 a person a week | 5,413 | $330 | $1,440 |

Chickpea assumptions:
- Cloudflare Workers Paid at $5 a month. Durable Objects, D1, and the cron trigger stay inside the plan's included usage at this volume.
- Model usage at $0.06 a request on a mid-tier model, paid to the provider directly. Pick a frontier model for some teammates and that line goes up; pick a small one and it goes down.
- Slack: named handles need a paid Slack plan, which a team of this size already has.

Claude Tag assumptions:
- Claude Team standard seats at $25 a person a month for all 25 people. If you already pay for Team, this line is sunk and only the token line is new.
- Token usage at $0.15 a request, since Tag runs a frontier model at API rates and offers no cheaper option.
- Launch credits are not counted. They run out.

## Where they differ

### One identity, or one per job
Claude Tag is @Claude. Everyone in the workspace talks to the same agent, with the same tools an admin connected, and the same memory of everything it has seen across channels. That is simple, and it is also why reviewers flag audit and least-privilege concerns: one identity holds every credential, and a message in #finance and a message in #support reach the same place.

Chickpea makes teammates. @support knows the refund policy and has the Zendesk account. @oncall has the GitHub App grant and the Sentry token. @revops reads HubSpot every Monday. Each one is a Slack user group with its own handle, its own instructions, its own memory, and its own connected accounts. The support teammate cannot touch the finance account because it was never given it.


### Anthropic models only, or the model each teammate deserves
Tag runs on Claude. At launch that meant Opus 4.8, billed by the token at API rates, with spend caps at the organization and channel level. There is no way to route triage to a cheap model or to try a different vendor for one job.

Chickpea pins a model per teammate across Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter, and Cloudflare Workers AI. A triage teammate on a small fast model costs pennies a day. The teammate that writes code review can run a frontier model. On Cloudflare you can start with no API key at all and switch later without changing anything else.


### Where the bill comes from
Claude Tag needs a Claude Team plan with at least ten paid seats, or Enterprise. Tag itself has no sticker price; usage is metered in tokens like the API, on top of the seats. Anthropic softened the launch with credits ($2,500 for Team, $25,000 for Enterprise), which is generous and also temporary.

Chickpea is Apache 2.0 software with no seats and no metering. The bill is Cloudflare Workers Paid at $5 a month plus whatever you pay your model provider, and you pay both of them directly. Nothing about your usage passes through a vendor that adds a margin.


### Setup and who can change things
Tag is provisioned by a Slack Primary Owner or Owner, who connects tools and sets which channels it can see. Team members use it; they do not shape it.

Chickpea is a Deploy to Cloudflare button, then connect Slack, then pick a provider, then send a message. After that, anyone with the right role asks @Chickpea in Slack to create a teammate, change its instructions or model, add a skill, or set a schedule. Anything that widens what a teammate can reach comes back as a proposal to approve. Anything involving a secret comes back as a link that finishes in the browser, so credentials never travel through a Slack message.


## Where Claude Tag is better
- Zero operations. Anthropic hosts it, upgrades it, and answers when it breaks. Chickpea is software you deploy and update yourself.
- Conversation awareness. Tag reads whole conversations rather than single messages and decides when to join in unprompted. Chickpea only reads messages that mention a teammate, on purpose, and never joins uninvited.
- Claude Code. At Anthropic, Tag opens most of the company's pull requests by handing work to Claude Code. Chickpea can read repositories and run a coding sandbox, but it is not a Claude Code front end.
- Enterprise admin. Role-based control over who can invoke it, per-channel spend limits, and a vendor with a compliance team behind it.

## Questions people ask

### Is Claude Tag the same as Claude in Slack?
Claude Tag is the June 2026 successor to the earlier Claude Slack app. The earlier app answered one person at a time. Tag works with any number of people in a channel, keeps memory across days, and can join a conversation without being mentioned.

### Can Claude Tag have more than one identity?
No. Tag is one @Claude that operates under your organization's identity. Chickpea creates a separate Slack handle per teammate, each with its own instructions, memory, model, and connected accounts.

### What does Claude Tag cost?
There is no separate Tag price. You need Claude Team with ten or more paid seats, or Enterprise, and Tag usage is billed in tokens on top of that with admin spend caps. Chickpea has no seats and no metering; you pay Cloudflare and your model provider directly.

### Can I use OpenAI or an open model with Claude Tag?
No. Tag runs Anthropic models only. Chickpea supports Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter, and Cloudflare Workers AI, and each teammate can be pinned to a different one.

### Does Chickpea read my channels the way Claude Tag does?
No. A Chickpea teammate only sees the channels you publish it to, and only messages that mention it reach a model. Nothing is read in the background. Tag reads whole conversations in the channels it is given and can jump in unprompted.

### Where does my data go with each one?
Claude Tag runs on Anthropic's infrastructure under your plan's terms. Chickpea runs in your own Cloudflare account or on your own Node host. Runtime, model traffic, configuration, memory, and connector credentials stay there. The one exception is opting into managed connectors, which hands OAuth for those accounts to Composio.

### Can Chickpea do the coding work Claude Tag does?
Some of it. A Chickpea teammate can be granted read access to GitHub repositories and, on Cloudflare, an optional coding sandbox with real checkouts and test runs. Tag goes further by handing work to Claude Code. If your main use is opening pull requests, try Tag first.

### Is Chickpea affiliated with Anthropic or Slack?
No. Chickpea is an independent open source project under the Apache 2.0 license. It is not affiliated with Anthropic or with Slack Technologies.

## Sources
- [Anthropic: How Anthropic works with Claude Tag in Slack (webinar)](https://www.anthropic.com/webinars/how-anthropic-works-with-claude-tag-in-slack)
- [TechCrunch, June 23 2026: Claude Tag is learning your company](https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/23/anthropics-claude-tag-is-learning-your-company-one-slack-message-at-a-time/)
- [VentureBeat: Claude Tag reads the full conversation and jumps in unprompted](https://venturebeat.com/orchestration/anthropics-new-claude-tag-update-lets-its-slack-agent-read-the-full-conversation-and-jump-in-unprompted)
- [eesel: Claude Tag pricing](https://www.eesel.ai/blog/claude-tag-pricing)
- [Junior: What is Claude Tag](https://junior.so/blog/what-is-claude-tag)
- [Chickpea docs: requirements and costs](https://docs.chickpea.co/start/requirements-and-costs/)
- [Chickpea docs: manage from Slack](https://docs.chickpea.co/slack/manage-from-slack/)
- [Chickpea docs: replies, tables, and status](https://docs.chickpea.co/slack/replies/)
- [Chickpea docs: security model](https://docs.chickpea.co/security/security-model/)
- [Chickpea source on GitHub](https://github.com/pejmanjohn/chickpea)

## More comparisons
- [Chickpea vs Grok Bot](https://chickpea.co/compare/grokbot.md)
- [Chickpea vs Viktor](https://chickpea.co/compare/viktor.md)
- [Chickpea vs Buzz](https://chickpea.co/compare/buzz.md)
- [Chickpea vs OpenClaw](https://chickpea.co/compare/openclaw.md)
- [Chickpea vs Hermes Agent](https://chickpea.co/compare/hermes.md)
- [All comparisons](https://chickpea.co/compare)

## Try Chickpea
- Site: https://chickpea.co/
- Deploy to Cloudflare: https://deploy.workers.cloudflare.com/?url=https://github.com/pejmanjohn/chickpea
- Source, Apache 2.0: https://github.com/pejmanjohn/chickpea
- Docs: https://docs.chickpea.co