README.md

Curator's take

Reach for Paperclip when you run many agents across providers 24/7 and need a boss layer — budgets that hard-stop, org charts, goal alignment, audit trail, mobile monitoring. Sweet spot: "20 Claude Code tabs, lost track of who does what." NOT the tool to build an agent (it orchestrates ones you already have), and overkill for a single agent or one linear pipeline. It's a control plane, not a framework.

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Paperclip is the app people use to manage AI agents for work.

Open-source orchestration for teams of AI agents.

If OpenClaw is an employee, Paperclip is the company.

Paperclip is a Node.js server and React UI that orchestrates a team of AI agents to run a business. Bring your own agents, assign goals, and track work and costs from one dashboard.

It looks like a task manager. Under the hood: org charts, budgets, governance, goal alignment, and agent coordination.

Manage business goals, not pull requests.

	Step	Example
01	Define the goal	"Build the #1 AI note-taking app to $1M MRR."
02	Hire the team	CEO, CTO, engineers, designers, marketers — any bot, any provider.
03	Approve and run	Review strategy. Set budgets. Hit go. Monitor from the dashboard.

Works
with

_OpenClaw

_{Claude Code}

_Codex

_Cursor

_Bash

_HTTP

If it can receive a heartbeat, it's hired.

Paperclip is right for you if

✅ You want to build autonomous AI companies
✅ You coordinate many different agents (OpenClaw, Codex, Claude, Cursor) toward a common goal
✅ You have 20 simultaneous Claude Code terminals open and lose track of what everyone is doing
✅ You want agents running autonomously 24/7, but still want to audit work and chime in when needed
✅ You want to monitor costs and enforce budgets
✅ You want a process for managing agents that feels like using a task manager
✅ You want to manage your autonomous businesses from your phone

Features

🔌 Bring Your Own Agent

Any agent, any runtime, one org chart. If it can receive a heartbeat, it's hired.

🎯 Goal Alignment

Continue your stack

What teams reach for next — and why each earns a place beside paperclip.

Pairs well with

LangGraph

Build stateful, multi-actor LLM apps as graphs — durable execution, human-in-the-loop, streaming.

Why it fitsLangGraph builds stateful, durable multi-actor agent apps; such an app can be 'hired' into Paperclip via HTTP/heartbeat and managed (budget, goals, audit) at the org level. Build the agent with LangGraph, govern the fleet with Paperclip.

Alternative to

CrewAI

Orchestrate role-playing, autonomous AI agents that collaborate on tasks.

Why it fitsBoth pitch orchestrating a team of agents toward a shared goal. Different altitude: CrewAI is a framework to build role-playing collaborating agents in-process; Paperclip is a BYO-agent management plane over external runtimes. Overlap in the multi-agent coordination job makes them substitutes for some users.

AutoGen

Multi-agent conversation framework for building LLM applications with cooperating agents.

Why it fitsAutoGen is a multi-agent framework for cooperating LLM agents — same coordination job as Paperclip, but as a library you build with rather than a dashboard you run external agents under.

core

Self-hosted, always-on "personal AI OS": watches your apps, keeps a persistent memory graph, and acts autonomously within guardrails — a product, not a library for building agents.

Why it fitsBoth are the layer ABOVE agent frameworks rather than a framework themselves, and both spawn coding-agent sessions — but CORE is a personal, memory-driven, always-on assistant while paperclip manages fleets of agents as a team/company. Pick CORE for a personal AI OS, paperclip for multi-agent org governance.