Claude Cowork vs OpenClaw: Which AI agent works for your business?

If you're a startup leader evaluating AI tools for your team, you've probably come across Claude Cowork and OpenClaw. Both promise to move AI beyond chat into real work. But which one actually delivers for a business, not just for technical users?

We compared both tools on the dimensions that matter most to startup operators: team collaboration, integrations, security, cost predictability, and the ability to take action across your stack. Here's what we found.

What startup leaders actually need from AI

Most startups run on five to ten tools: Slack, a CRM, a project tracker, Google Workspace, maybe Stripe or a data warehouse. The data lives in silos. Pulling insights requires hopping between dashboards or waiting on someone who knows SQL.

The right AI tool for a startup should connect to your existing stack, surface insights across systems, and take action on what it finds. Not just answer questions, but do work.

That's the lens we used to evaluate Claude Cowork and OpenClaw.

Claude Cowork

Claude Cowork is Anthropic's desktop agent for knowledge work. It launched in January 2026 as a "research preview" and gives Claude the ability to read, edit, and create files on your local machine. Think of it as a capable assistant that lives on your laptop.

Strengths: The UX is polished. Task queuing lets you stack work and step away. The plugin ecosystem covers productivity, sales, and marketing functions. Users report completing in 20 minutes what normally takes 3+ hours.

Limitations for startups: It's an individual tool, not a team tool. There's no shared context, no organizational memory, and no way for your team to benefit from what one person teaches it. It runs on macOS only. The Max plan costs $100-200/month per person.

Cowork's security problem

Within 48 hours of launch, security researchers at PromptArmor discovered a prompt injection vulnerability that allows attackers to silently exfiltrate confidential files. The attack uses curl commands through Anthropic's own whitelisted API, meaning it bypasses the tool's sandbox restrictions.

The flaw was disclosed to Anthropic three months before launch. They shipped anyway. As of late January 2026, it remained unpatched.

Anthropic's own documentation admits "the chances of an attack are still non-zero" and places the security burden on users. Security researchers have pointed out that asking non-technical knowledge workers to "monitor Claude for suspicious actions indicating prompt injection" is unrealistic. That's exactly the audience Cowork is built for.

The tool also lacks audit logs, a compliance API, and data exports, making it a non-starter for any startup thinking about enterprise sales or regulated data.

OpenClaw

OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot, formerly Moltbot) is an open-source, self-hosted AI agent you control through messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Slack. It's free, extensible, and can run 24/7 with persistent memory.

Strengths: The integration list is long (38+ services). The community is active. For developers who want to tinker, the extensibility is unmatched.

Limitations for startups: It requires dedicated engineering resources to deploy and maintain. API costs are wildly unpredictable, with users reporting $400 to $3,600 per month depending on usage. The project's own creator has warned that "most non-techies should not install this."

OpenClaw's security problem

CrowdStrike released a dedicated enterprise detection and removal tool for OpenClaw in February 2026. Gartner called it "insecure by default" with "unacceptable cybersecurity risks." Cisco described it as "an absolute nightmare."

Bitsight found over 30,000 exposed OpenClaw instances on the public internet between January and February 2026. A high-severity remote code execution flaw was disclosed and patched in OpenClaw that could have allowed attackers to gain full control through a single malicious link.

Zenity researchers demonstrated that attackers can establish persistent backdoors by injecting malicious instructions into OpenClaw's memory file. Trend Micro reported real-world data breaches involving millions of records, including API tokens, private messages, and credentials. Snyk found that 7.1% of skills in the ClawHub marketplace leak credentials.

For a startup handling customer data, the vulnerability of OpenClaw is disqualifying.

The gap both tools leave open

Cowork is an individual productivity tool and OpenClaw is a DIY project. Neither is built for a team that needs AI working securely across their business.

Startups need something that connects to CRM, Slack, GitHub, and billing, that works for the whole team, and that moves from insight to execution without requiring a dedicated engineer to maintain it.

Adapt: the tool built for this

Adapt is a unified AI layer that connects to your business tools and takes action across them. It integrates with Slack, HubSpot, Linear, Stripe, GitHub, Google Workspace, and more.

Where Cowork answers questions about your local files and OpenClaw gives you a hackable agent, Adapt gives you an intelligence layer across your business. It updates CRM records, opens PRs, runs data analysis, and delivers scheduled reports. It works where your team already is, in Slack and a web app.

Regarding security, Adapt runs in sandboxed containers on Kubernetes with gVisor isolation. Secrets are encrypted. There's no local system access required. The platform is on a SOC 2 compliance path.

Adapt operates on usage-based pricing with no per-seat licenses. Your whole team gets access without multiplying cost-per-head.

Adapt also builds organizational memory over time. When one person teaches it something, the whole team benefits.

Our ranking of AI agents for business

1. Adapt

For teams that need AI working securely across their entire business. \

2. Claude Cowork

For Individual technical who want a capable desktop agent. \

3. OpenClaw

For technical hobbyists willing to build and maintain their own setup.

If you're building a startup and want AI that works for your whole team, not just one person's desktop, get early access to Adapt.