Recently, our team has been fielding the same question from customers, prospects, and friends: "What's the difference between Hyper and OpenClaw?"
It makes sense. OpenClaw (formerly Moltbot/Clawdbot) hit 173,000 GitHub stars because it showed people what autonomous AI agents could actually look like — browser control, code execution, file access, tool connections. That resonated. We're an AI-native team. We use these tools ourselves. We pay attention to what's shipping in the ecosystem.
So here's what we tell people when they ask.
What OpenClaw gets right
OpenClaw proved that people want AI agents that do things, not just talk about doing things. It connects to 50+ platforms, runs on your local machine, supports multiple AI models, and it's open source under MIT. The community around it is active and the project moves fast.
If you're a developer who wants to tinker with local-first AI agents, contribute to open source, or experiment with connecting Claude to your own tools — OpenClaw is a genuinely good project for that.
Where things get complicated
Security
This is the part most people don't discover until after they've set things up.
OpenClaw has documented vulnerabilities that matter if you're running it for anything beyond personal experiments. There's an arbitrary Local File Inclusion (LFI) vulnerability in the media delivery pipeline that lets attackers bypass the sandbox and access sensitive files. The localhost auto-approval bypass was serious enough to require an emergency patch in v2.1. Credentials are stored in plain text files. The Gateway defaults to a configuration that users frequently expose to the public internet by accident.
BranDefense published research on what they call the "Shadow AI" problem — developers spinning up OpenClaw gateways without governance, leaving API keys and credentials exposed on unhardened instances.
None of this means OpenClaw is bad software. It means it's open-source infrastructure that requires you to handle security yourself. If you're comfortable with that responsibility and you're not handling customer data, that's a reasonable tradeoff. If you're running anything for a business, these are things you'd want to know going in.
Hyper handles this differently. Credentials are encrypted at rest and in transit. Nothing runs on your local machine. We don't use your data for training. There are no open ports to misconfigure. Audit trails track everything agents do. It's not that we added security features — it's that we built the platform so these problems don't exist in the first place.
Setup and maintenance
OpenClaw requires Docker, environment variables, config file editing, Node.js 22+, and ongoing maintenance. If you want it accessible remotely, add VPS provisioning, SSL certificates, and software updates to that list. Even OpenClaw Cloud at $24.99/month still requires configuration work.
For engineers who live in the terminal, this is fine. For marketing teams, founders wearing multiple hats, or agencies trying to get work done — it's a real barrier. And the maintenance doesn't stop after setup. Every update, every new integration, every security patch is on you.
Hyper is a managed platform. Sign up, connect your accounts, start working. Five minutes. We handle the infrastructure because the point is getting work done, not maintaining the system that does the work.
Browser automation at scale
Both platforms can control browsers, but the details diverge quickly. OpenClaw uses Playwright locally — solid for basic automation, but it struggles with anti-bot detection on modern websites and every session consumes resources on your machine.
Hyper runs browser sessions in cloud infrastructure with built-in anti-detection, session resilience, and the ability to scale multiple sessions simultaneously. When something breaks, the platform handles recovery instead of leaving you to debug Playwright errors at 2am.
What Hyper does that OpenClaw doesn't
This is where the platforms diverge most clearly.
| Capability | OpenClaw | Hyper |
|---|---|---|
| Browser control | Local, Playwright-based | Cloud, anti-detection built in |
| Code execution | On your machine | Sandboxed environment |
| Tool integrations | 50+ via manual setup | Native one-click integrations |
| Scheduling | Manual cron configuration | Built-in scheduler with recurring tasks |
| Marketing expertise (media buying, organic content, SEO) | ✕ | Built-in across paid, owned, and organic channels |
| Security | Self-managed | Encrypted, audited, no open ports |
| Setup time | 30–60 minutes minimum | 5 minutes |
OpenClaw gives you a capable agent that responds when you message it. Hyper adds something on top of that: agents that work on a schedule, run recurring tasks autonomously, and chain together in multi-step workflows. You can copy a template — say, "run a competitive SEO audit every Monday" — assign it to an agent, and it just runs. That's the difference between a tool you use and a system that works alongside you.
Which one is right for you
If you're very technical and want to experiment with AI agents in this capacity, OpenClaw is genuinely fun to play with. The open-source community is active and the project moves fast.
But when it comes to running things at scale — whether you're technical or not — the calculus changes. Security requirements evolve constantly. Infrastructure needs maintenance. In our opinion, you want a platform that handles all of this for you. Otherwise, you're either opening yourself up to vulnerabilities or spending significant time on something you could outsource.
That's what we built Hyper for. Connect your tools, deploy agents with built-in marketing expertise and operational capabilities, and let the platform handle the security and infrastructure so you can focus on the work that matters.
Learn more at hyperfx.ai.