Comparison

Chickpea vs OpenClaw

One personal agent behind ten 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 4, 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 channel works. It is also work to set up, work to keep running, and shaped around one person's agent rather than a team's roster.

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.

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

OpenClaw6 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 ten channels. Socket Mode or HTTP, 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 22 or newer.
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.	No. Configured on the command line and in openclaw.json.
Asks before consequential actions	Yes. Sending, deleting, publishing, and bulk changes wait for a person.	Partly. DM pairing codes and allowlists; no built-in gate on actions.
Accounts connected per teammate	Yes. 35 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.	Partly. Threads, mentions, reactions, slash command; text chunked at 4,000 characters.

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	$37	$44
Medium, 20 a person a week	2,165	$135	$142
Heavy, 50 a person a week	5,413	$330	$337

Chickpea

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.

OpenClaw

A small always-on VPS at about $12 a month, since a team gateway should not run on someone's laptop.
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 the Slack experience, 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 Discord, Google Chat, iMessage, Matrix, Microsoft Teams, Signal, Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, and Zalo, with more as plugins. The Slack channel has what a channel adapter needs: Socket Mode or HTTP, mention gating, three threading modes, reactions, a slash command, and a pairing policy for DMs from strangers. Long replies are chunked at 4,000 characters. Streaming, native tables, and live status are not part of it, because the same reply has to work on WhatsApp.

Chickpea only has to work in Slack, so it uses everything Slack has. A reply opens as a streaming message under the teammate's own name, task rows tick off above the answer, the status line under the composer says what it is doing, data comes back as a native sortable table, 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.

One agent, or a roster

OpenClaw supports multi-agent routing with isolated sessions per agent, workspace, or sender. On Slack, though, the config takes one bot token and one app token, so a second named bot in the same workspace is a second Slack app and a second gateway configuration. Guides that walk through running several agents as Slack teammates exist, and they are several pages long. You also have to prevent bot-to-bot reply loops yourself.

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 npm install, an onboarding command that installs a daemon, a Slack app you create by hand with the right scopes and event subscriptions, and tokens pasted into a config. The project estimates five minutes for the install; the Slack part is longer, and a whole genre of troubleshooting guides exists for the bot not responding. Then the daemon has to stay up, on a laptop or a VPS you maintain.

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 is configured by whoever has the config file and the shell. That is the right model for a personal agent.

Chickpea has roles. 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 Workers Paid 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. Over a hundred thousand GitHub stars, a plugin ecosystem, and third parties who will host it for you.

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 create a Slack app, enable Socket Mode or HTTP, add the bot and app tokens to the OpenClaw config, subscribe to message and mention events, and invite the bot to channels. It supports mention gating, threading modes, reactions, a slash command, and a DM pairing policy. Chickpea installs from a Deploy button and a Slack install, and adds streaming, native tables, task rows, and live status on top of threads and reactions.

Can OpenClaw run multiple named bots in Slack?

Yes, with a Slack app and gateway configuration per bot, plus guardrails against bots replying to each other. 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 gates who can talk to it, with DM pairing codes and allowlists, and you can write guardrails into its instructions. It does not have a built-in approval step for consequential actions. Chickpea waits for a person before sending, deleting, publishing, or bulk changes, unless the teammate's instructions say otherwise.

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 needs Cloudflare Workers Paid at $5 a month.

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.

Deploy to Cloudflare 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.