Comparison

Chickpea vs OpenClaw

One agent gateway behind 20+ chat apps, or a team of Slack teammates on a one-click deploy.

By Pejman Pour-Moezzi, creator of Chickpea.·Facts checked against the sources on September 29, 2026.

The short version

OpenClaw is the most popular open source agent there is. It runs on your own laptop, connects to every chat app you use, and does real things with files, shells, and the web. Slack is one of its channels, and the Slack plugin now streams, renders native tables, and puts approval buttons in the thread. There is a team mode too: one shared gateway with per-person sign-in and roles. It is still work to set up and keep running, a fresh install starts with full tool access and no approval prompts, and its own docs say everyone who can message a tool-enabled agent shares that agent's authority.

Chickpea is a Slack product. Teammates have handles, memory, and accounts of their own; anyone with the right role creates one by asking; consequential actions wait for a person; and the deploy is one button into your Cloudflare account. Both are open source. The difference is what each one is for.

Choose OpenClaw if

You want one agent that follows you across Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, and iMessage.
You want it on your own laptop, with local models through Ollama if you like.
You are comfortable with npm, a config file, and a Slack app manifest, and you enjoy the tinkering.
You need a community and plugin ecosystem measured in the hundreds of thousands of stars.
Your team trusts each other and wants one shared gateway with per-person sign-in, operator roles, and shared sessions.

Choose Chickpea if

You want teammates for the whole workspace, with one deploy and no daemon on anyone's laptop.
You want each teammate to have its own handle, accounts, memory, and model without running a gateway per bot.
You want non-engineers to create and change teammates by asking in Slack.
You want approvals, per-teammate credential isolation, and roles as the default rather than a config you write.

Side by side

Twelve things that decide it.

OpenClaw. The open source personal agent gateway. Runs on your machine or a server and connects one agent to Slack, Discord, Telegram, WhatsApp, and more. Chickpea. An open source Slack app that gives a workspace named AI teammates, on your own account. Here is how they line up on the questions teams ask first.

Chickpea12 of 12

OpenClaw7 of 12, 5 partly

Yes Partly No

Criterion	Chickpea	OpenClaw
Works inside Slack	Yes. Slack is the product: channels, threads, DMs.	Yes, as one of 20+ channels, through the Slack plugin. Socket Mode, HTTP, or a relay; your own Slack app.
Several named teammates	Yes. Each teammate has its own handle, instructions, memory, and model.	Partly. One bot token per workspace config; more handles mean more gateways.
Open source	Yes. Apache 2.0.	Yes. MIT, run by a non-profit foundation.
Runs on your infrastructure	Yes. Your Cloudflare account, or Node on your own host.	Yes. Your laptop or a server, with Node 24.16 or newer, or the official Docker image.
Your own model keys	Yes. Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter, or Workers AI with no key at all.	Yes. Any provider's key, including local models.
Choice of model provider	Yes. Four providers, pinned per teammate.	Yes. Whatever you configure.
No seats, no markup	Yes. No seats, no credits. You pay the provider and Cloudflare directly.	Yes. Free software; you pay the host and the provider.
Managed from Slack	Yes. Create and change teammates by asking @Chickpea. Secrets finish in the browser.	Partly. Owners can hand config changes and keys to the agent in chat, approved with buttons; setup is the CLI and openclaw.json.
Asks before consequential actions	Yes. Sending, deleting, publishing, and bulk changes wait for a person.	Partly. Exec approvals, automatic command review, and Slack approval buttons, but off on a fresh install.
Accounts connected per teammate	Yes. 37 connector presets plus HTTP APIs and MCP servers, connected to one teammate each.	Partly. Tools and keys live on the host and are shared by what runs there.
Scheduled work	Yes. Recurring or one-time, created in Slack, posted to a channel.	Yes. Cron-style routines.
Streaming, tables, live status	Yes. Streamed replies, native tables, task rows, live status, a signed footer.	Yes. Streamed replies with task cards, native tables and charts, approval buttons.

Cost

What a 25-person team pays a month.

Three usage levels, from a few questions a week to a teammate in every thread. Chickpea's bill is the infrastructure and the model provider, paid directly. Open the numbers for every assumption.

The numbers and the assumptions

Usage	Requests a month	Chickpea	OpenClaw on a small VPS
Light, 5 a person a week	541	$32	$44
Medium, 20 a person a week	2,165	$130	$142
Heavy, 50 a person a week	5,413	$325	$337

Chickpea

Cloudflare on the Free plan, $0. The Worker fits the Free size limit, and Workers, Durable Objects, D1, and the cron trigger stay inside the free allowances at this volume. Workers Paid ($5 a month) is only needed for the optional coding sandbox or past those allowances.
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.

OpenClaw

A small always-on VPS at about $12 a month, since a team gateway should not run on someone's laptop. OpenClaw's docs list 1 GB of memory as the minimum; the official image idled at 1.2 to 1.6 GiB in our September 29, 2026 run, so treat 2 GB as the floor.
Model usage at $0.06 a request, the same assumption as Chickpea, paid to the provider directly.
The chart is a near tie on purpose. Neither project charges anything. The difference is the hours of setup and upkeep and the trust model, which the chart cannot show.

Estimates from published prices on OpenClaw Foundation's own pages and the sources at the bottom of this page. A request is one mention that reads a thread, maybe calls a tool, and answers. Your usage will differ; the shape of the bars is the point.

In detail

Where they differ.

Slack as one channel, or Slack as the product

OpenClaw connects a gateway to more than twenty chat platforms, from Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, and WhatsApp to iMessage, Signal, and Matrix, plus native apps for macOS, iOS, and Android. Slack is a plugin you install, and it has grown well past a channel adapter: Socket Mode, HTTP, or a relay; channels allowlisted with a mention required; DM pairing codes; replies that stream with native task cards (the default since 2026.8.1); native Slack tables up to 100 rows and charts; and approval buttons in the thread. It also installs org-wide on Enterprise Grid.

On rendering the two are now close. The difference is shape. A Chickpea reply streams under the teammate's own name, the status line under the composer says what it is doing, and the footer names the teammate and model with a link to change either. Teammates are Slack user groups, so @support is a real handle people can mention and search, and a new teammate needs nothing on the Slack side.

One agent, or a roster

OpenClaw supports multi-agent routing with isolated sessions per agent, workspace, or sender. On Slack, though, each account is its own Slack app with its own tokens, so a second named bot in the same workspace is a second app and a second account in the gateway config. Guides that walk through running several agents as Slack teammates exist, and they are several pages long. Since 2026.9.7 bot-authored Slack messages start turns by default, with built-in loop protection that pauses a pair of bots after 20 exchanges in a minute.

In Chickpea a roster is the default. Ask @Chickpea in a channel to make a support teammate and one message creates it, gives it a handle, and publishes it to that channel. Each teammate has its own instructions, memory, connected accounts, repositories, schedules, and model. A second teammate needs nothing on the Slack side.

Setup and upkeep

OpenClaw is an install script (51 seconds on a clean Debian container when we timed it on September 29, 2026), an onboarding command that installs a daemon, the Slack plugin, a Slack app you create from its manifest, and tokens in the config. The official Docker image is a 1.26 GB download and idled at 1.2 to 1.6 GiB of memory with Slack loaded in our run. Then the gateway has to stay up, on a laptop or a server you maintain, and users report updates that break working setups; recent releases back up state before each migration and restore it on rollback.

Chickpea is a Deploy to Cloudflare button that clones the repository into your account, a Slack install, a provider choice, and a message. On Cloudflare it runs on Workers with Durable Objects and D1, so there is no process to keep alive. Updates are a redeploy you choose to run.

Who can change what

OpenClaw now documents a team setup. People sign in to its Control UI through Tailscale or an identity-aware proxy, sessions record who started, owns, and steered them, and named operator roles bound which sessions, agents, and scopes each person gets and whether their sessions must be sandboxed. Owners can also approve config changes from chat. The same guide is plain about the limit: everyone who can message a tool-enabled agent shares that agent's delegated tool authority, and people who should not share it need separate gateways.

Chickpea has roles too, and puts them in Slack. Members create teammates and edit the ones whose policy allows it; Admins and Owners manage providers; only an Owner changes another member's role. Small reversible changes apply right away. Anything that widens a teammate's reach or capability comes back as a proposal to approve in the thread. Credentials never enter model context; connecting an account is a short-lived link that finishes in the browser, locked to one teammate and one connector.

Fair is fair

Where OpenClaw is better.

Every chat app. If your agent should answer on WhatsApp at night and Slack by day, OpenClaw does that and Chickpea does not.
Runs anywhere, including a laptop with local models. Chickpea needs a Cloudflare account, on the Free plan, or a Node host with a public HTTPS origin.
Hands on the machine. OpenClaw reads and writes files, runs shell commands, and browses. Chickpea works through connectors, MCP servers, HTTP APIs, repositories, and an optional coding sandbox.
Community. About 391,000 GitHub stars, the ClawHub registry, a non-profit foundation with a long-term-support release line, and third parties who will host it for you.
A team gateway for people who trust each other. Per-person sign-in, operator roles, shared sessions with attribution, and native Slack tables and charts. That closes gaps we used to list here. What it does not change is the trust model: one gateway is one boundary, and tool credentials belong to the gateway, not to a teammate.

Questions people ask

Is OpenClaw open source?

Yes. OpenClaw is MIT licensed and developed by the OpenClaw Foundation, a non-profit. Chickpea is Apache 2.0. Both are free to run.

How does OpenClaw's Slack integration work?

You install the Slack plugin, create a Slack app from its manifest, choose Socket Mode, HTTP, or a relay, and add the tokens to the OpenClaw config. It supports mention gating per channel, DM pairing codes, streamed replies with task cards, native tables and charts, and approval buttons. Chickpea installs from a Deploy button and a Slack install, and adds a handle per teammate and management by asking in Slack.

Can OpenClaw run multiple named bots in Slack?

Yes, with a Slack app and an account in the gateway config per bot. Since 2026.9.7 bots can trigger each other by default, with built-in loop protection. Chickpea creates teammates by asking in Slack, each with its own handle, and needs nothing extra on the Slack side.

Can Chickpea run on my laptop like OpenClaw?

Chickpea runs on Node, but it expects a host with a public HTTPS origin and a private state directory, because a Slack workspace is talking to it. The recommended deployment is your own Cloudflare account, which has no process to keep alive.

Does OpenClaw ask before it acts?

It can. Exec approvals, automatic command review, and approval buttons in Slack exist, but a fresh install starts with full tool access and no prompts, so you turn them on. Its approvals cover commands and plugin requests, and its own security policy calls them operator guardrails, not a boundary between users. Chickpea waits for a person before sending, deleting, publishing, or bulk changes, unless the teammate's instructions say otherwise.

Does OpenClaw have a team mode?

Yes. Its team guide sets up one shared gateway with per-person sign-in through Tailscale or an identity-aware proxy, shared sessions with attribution, and named operator roles. It is for people who trust each other: everyone who can message the agent shares its tool authority. Chickpea gives each teammate its own accounts and puts consequential actions behind a person.

Which is cheaper?

They cost about the same to run: a small host plus your model provider's bill. OpenClaw can be cheaper still on a laptop with local models. Chickpea runs on Cloudflare's Free plan.

Can I use OpenClaw and Chickpea together?

Yes. Nothing stops a personal OpenClaw agent and a Chickpea deployment sharing a workspace. Some teams do exactly that: OpenClaw for the individual, Chickpea for the shared teammates.

Try it

Your first teammate, this afternoon.

One deploy into your own Cloudflare account, connect Slack, pick a model, and ask for a teammate in a sentence. Apache 2.0, no seats, no credits.

Star on GitHub

Or read how it works first.

More comparisons

Sources

Facts about OpenClaw come from OpenClaw Foundation's own pages and the coverage linked above, and were last checked on the date in the byline. Products change; if something here is out of date, open an issue and it will be fixed. A plain-text copy of this page is at /compare/openclaw.md. OpenClaw and its logo belong to OpenClaw Foundation, which is not affiliated with Chickpea.