Everything OpenClaw gives you. None of the maintenance.

What OpenClaw is and who uses it

OpenClaw is an open-source agent framework built by Peter Steinberger's team, released in November 2025 and reaching 214,000+ GitHub stars within months. It runs primarily as a desktop application connecting to Claude models to provide computer use capabilities — browser control, code execution, and file operations. It has an active community contributing 700+ community-built skills.

The typical OpenClaw user: a technical developer comfortable in a terminal, willing to invest setup time in exchange for control and avoiding subscription fees. The framework is well-built and well-documented. The community is active and productive.

The operational limitation: it runs locally, requiring your machine to be on for the agent to work. Memory is not persistent across reinstalls. Scheduling is not built in. When Anthropic updates the computer use API or a Node.js dependency, users update manually and test for regressions.

The core trade OpenClaw users are making

OpenClaw users typically know the trade they are making: they get maximum control and zero subscription fees beyond API costs, in exchange for handling all operations themselves. That trade makes sense for developers who genuinely value the control and have the time.

The trade breaks down in a few common situations: when the setup time starts competing with the work the agent is supposed to be enabling, when the developer wants the agent available 24/7 without keeping their machine on, or when they want to run multiple agent profiles without managing separate instances.

Hermes OS is built for exactly these situations. You bring your API key — the same one you were using with OpenClaw — and get a managed cloud environment that runs the agent for you.

What migrates and what does not

Hermes v0.5.0 ships with an official OpenClaw import tool. It reads your exported OpenClaw configuration and imports agent prompts, skill documents, and API key settings into Hermes. The importer handles the format differences automatically — you do not need to manually rewrite prompts or skill files. Run `hermes import --from openclaw --path /path/to/export` and the migration wizard walks through the rest.

Custom tool configurations and skill documents in the agentskills.io format import directly. The main thing that does not migrate is local browser session history and stored cookies for logged-in sites — those are machine-local by nature. On Hermes OS, you re-authenticate the first time the agent needs access to a site, and the session is then stored on the cloud server for subsequent runs.

Your Anthropic API key from your OpenClaw setup works identically on Hermes OS. You are not changing providers or re-configuring model access. You are moving the execution environment from your machine to persistent cloud infrastructure.

Capabilities comparison

Browser automation: both support headless browser control. Hermes OS offers four backends (Browserbase, Browser Use cloud, Chrome CDP, local Chromium) plus SSRF safeguards. OpenClaw runs from your local machine IP.

Memory: OpenClaw has session-level context but no built-in long-term memory store. Hermes OS implements USER.md and MEMORY.md for persistent context, plus Skill Documents in the agentskills.io format for procedural memory across sessions.

Scheduling: OpenClaw does not support autonomous scheduled tasks. Hermes OS has full cron scheduling with event hooks for conditional triggering.

Multi-agent: OpenClaw runs one agent at a time. Hermes OS supports unlimited profiles per instance with up to 3 concurrent subagents delegating tasks in parallel.

Model support: OpenClaw focuses on Anthropic's Claude family (the Node.js runtime is optimized for it). Hermes OS supports Claude Haiku 4.5, Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.6, GPT-5.4, GPT-5 mini, and 300+ OpenRouter models.