4 Reasons why we chose Openclaw and not Calude Cowork for AI workflow automation at work

This post is split into 2 sections:

1. A quick 101 on Agent harness (Openclaw, Hermes, Claude Cowork)
2. 1 to 1 comparison of Openclaw vs Claude Cowork

Agent Harness

Other than releasing new and exciting models every 6 months, these past few years have also introduced new terms into our lexicon like never before.

First man created the LLM which is the actual model (think chatgpt).

Then came the Agent, where an LLM can connect to tools and you can prompt it to do things. For example, “Automatically create and post AI articles on X every Friday based on the latest AI news”. These used to be single purpose workflows that ran on tools like N8N or Make, and can be blamed for most of the slop out there.

And now we have Agent harness. Some great things that AI Agent Harnesses allow you to do:

1. Configure and manage multiple agentic workflows from a single control layer
2. Build all these workflows just by prompting
3. Create specialist agents with task-specific prompts, tools, permissions, and knowledge access
4. Maintain persistent memory and contextual state across users, and interactions
5. Orchestrate complex usecases

Openclaw, Hermes, Claude Cowork and Codex app are all Agent Harnesses.

Openclaw vs Claude Cowork

My hero is openclaw, Im chosing to compare it to Claude Cowork because that’s become the go-to for personal AI assisntants at the workspace.

At Yellow Intelligence we identified very early that Claude Cowork just wont cut it if we needed to scale and drive adoption for fast moving sales teams. Here’s why:

1. Muti-tenant orchestration

With Openclaw a single shared deployment is possible. An entire team can share the same skills, workflows and automations with Openclaw. All this while still having user based access and security measures.

Claude Cowork is designed to be run on personal laptops, and so if Patrick has setup this really cool workflow that’s saving time preparing outreach emails, its difficult to port it into his colleague’s Sahil’s machine. Also every time Patrick makes an improvement, it stays in his machine and never propogates to Sahil.

2. Hosted vs Local

Openclaw is meant to be hosted on another machine, not on your laptop. This is a superpower…. Why? One it makes multi-tenant possible, but more importantly, it never switches off. This is superuseful if you want to run critical workflows and automations that should not fail just because your laptop is switched off.

Claude Cowork on the other hand is meant to run on your laptop. So if you scheduled a job to send a client a weekly report every 3pm on Wednesday, but closed your laptop for a cofee break, then that report will not go out.

3. Adoption

This ties into all the above points we spoke about. When we deploy Openclaw to teams, its accessible directly via Slack and Teams. No new login, and just like a teammate. Skills and workflows that we refined with the team AI champion, then become ready to use for everyone. We take ideas and feedback, and add new AI automations or processes that make it useful for everyone.

Claude Cowork is designed to for the individual, and hence adoption becomes patchy. Everyone’s using it, but its patchy and isolated. Knowledge is often left unshared.

3. Configuration of workflows

I’ve had the hardest time explaining this part to people, and to be honest it’s the most important. Openclaw is opensource, so I can modify the code as I want. Why would I do this? Because many times workflows are complex, or you need some steps to be deterministic or you wan to do dry runs on production without effecting your data or something else thats really important….. Openclaw allows me to do all of that. I can test, debug, break and modify as needed, and then deploy the fully running workflow.

Anthropic does not expose its internal implementation or code. The only way you can modify anything in Claude Cowork is to ask Claude Cowork to do it. You can see how this can be problematic. Often I see managers just accept mediocre work because its not worth trying.

4. Subscrption Management

With oneOpenclaw + Codex subscription, the entire team can be using it. Again, with no sensitive user information shared across users. Or you can plug it into a strong local model, and not even pay that.

Claude Cowork’s entire business model is seat based subscription. Not only do you end up paying more, but it’s a pain managing subscriptions.