Overview
CowAgent is a self-hosted AI assistant and agent harness that grew out of chatgpt-on-wechat, one of the longest-running open-source chat-assistant projects. The rewrite keeps the thing that made the original useful — it meets people inside the messaging app they already use — and adds the machinery an agent needs to do work rather than only reply: task planning and decomposition, iterative tool execution, and a memory that persists between conversations.
The built-in tool set covers file I/O, a terminal, a browser, a scheduler, web search and vision, with MCP support for anything not bundled. Input is multimodal — text, images, voice and files. Skills install in one click from a marketplace, and agents can be grouped into multi-agent teams that share a conversation. Memory is organised in three tiers with automatic distillation, alongside an auto-curated knowledge base you can browse as a graph.
Deployment is deliberately undemanding: a one-line install script on Linux, macOS or Windows, or a Docker Compose file, after which a web console runs on port 9899. Model providers are swappable from that console and span the major hosted families — Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, Kimi, MiniMax, Doubao and ERNIE among them — and the assistant can be exposed through the web console plus Telegram, Slack, Discord, WeChat, Feishu/Lark, DingTalk, WeCom and QQ. It is MIT-licensed, with the project noting it is open-sourced for technical research and learning.
What it does
- Task planning and decomposition with iterative tool execution
- Built-in file, terminal, browser, scheduler, web-search and vision tools, plus MCP integration
- Three-tier memory with automatic distillation, and an auto-curated knowledge base with a graph view
- Multi-agent teams that share a conversation
- One-click skill installation from a marketplace
- Multimodal input: text, images, voice and files
- Swappable model providers and a dozen messaging channels, configured from a web console
Getting started
CowAgent installs with a single command and then runs behind a local web console. The commands below come from the project README.
Install on Linux or macOS
One script fetches and starts the assistant.
bash <(curl -fsSL https://cdn.link-ai.tech/code/cow/run.sh)Install on Windows
The PowerShell equivalent of the same installer.
irm https://cdn.link-ai.tech/code/cow/run.ps1 | iexOr run it with Docker
Pull the published Compose file and bring the stack up in the background.
curl -O https://cdn.link-ai.tech/code/cow/docker-compose.yml
docker compose up -dOpen the web console
The console is where models, channels, tools and skills are configured.
http://localhost:9899Pick a model and connect a channel
Choose a provider from the console — Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, Kimi, MiniMax, Doubao and ERNIE are among those supported — then connect the messaging platforms you want the assistant to answer in.
Console → Models → select provider
Console → Channels → Telegram / Slack / Discord / WeChat / Feishu / DingTalk / WeCom / QQCommands and code are distilled from the project's own documentation — always check the official repo for the latest.
When to use it
- Reach for it when the assistant has to live inside the messaging apps a team already uses, not a separate web app
- Reach for it when you want a self-hosted assistant that can actually run terminal, file and browser tools
- Reach for it when conversations should build up long-term memory and a browsable knowledge base
- Reach for it when you need to swap model providers from a console instead of redeploying
How CowAgent compares
CowAgent alongside other open-source assistants & chatbots tools AI/TLDR tracks, ranked by GitHub stars.
| Tool | Stars | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| OpenClaw | ★ 390k | OpenClaw is a self-hosted personal AI assistant that answers you on WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, and many other channels, with voice and a live visual canvas. |
| Hermes Agent | ★ 246k | A self-improving personal AI agent from Nous Research that builds skills from experience, remembers across sessions, and reaches you on Telegram, Discord, Slack, and more. |
| Odysseus | ★ 87.3k | A self-hosted AI workspace that puts chat, agents, deep research, documents, email, notes, tasks and calendar behind one Docker Compose stack, over local or API models. |
| CowAgent | ★ 47k | A self-hosted assistant that plans tasks, runs tools and answers wherever your team already chats |
| AstrBot | ★ 40.6k | An all-in-one agent chatbot platform that puts LLM conversations, tools, knowledge bases and a plugin marketplace inside messaging apps like Telegram, Slack, Discord, QQ and Feishu. |
| OpenHuman | ★ 39.8k | A local-first desktop personal AI for macOS, Windows and Linux that keeps a compressed memory tree on your machine and orchestrates checkpointed research and automation workflows. |
| MindsHub | ★ 39.7k | An agent workspace for knowledge work and software development that runs swappable open-source agent harnesses against your choice of frontier or open models. |
| Khoj | ★ 37.4k | An open-source, self-hostable personal AI that chats with any local or online LLM, answers from your own documents and the web, and runs custom agents. |