Comment by kylemh
9 days ago
The main one is that you can run and/or host it remotely, unlike Claude Desktop. By this I mean, you can run OpenClaw on a service like Tailscale and protect your actual machine from certain security/privacy concerns and - regardless of the choice - you can connect your access to OpenClaw via any chat agent or SSH tunnel, so you can access it from a phone. If Claude Cowork comes to iOS/Android with a tunnel option, they can resolve this difference.
A smaller difference would be that you can use any/all models with OpenClaw.
Hmm, whats stopping you from running claude code on a separate machine you can ssh into? I don't understand that point at all, I do that all the time.
Using a claude code instance through a phone app is certainly not something that is easy to do, so if there's like a phone app that makes that easy, I can see that being a big differentiator.
Something I learned while hacking on something recently is that claude’s non-interactive mode is super powerful. It uses all the same tools/permissions etc as interactive would, it can stream responses as JSON with tool use etc, and it can resume from a previous session. Together this means you can actually build a really slick chat-like UI for it.
I think this is a pretty cool example: https://github.com/mcintyre94/wisp
This is using Claude on VMs that don’t have SSH, so can’t use a regular terminal emulator. They stream responses to commands over websockets, which works perfectly with Claude’s streaming. They can run an interactive console session, but instead I built a chat UI around this non-interactive mode.
You can see how I build the Claude command here: https://github.com/mcintyre94/wisp/blob/main/Wisp/ViewModels...
OpenClaw is probably overkill if you just want to have a nice remote UI to access claude code, do tool call approvals. There are a ton of remote cli apps and guides to setup ssh access via tailscale etc, but none that just work with a nice remote web interface.
For me personally I can't stand interacting with agents via CLI and fixed width fonts so I built a e2e encrypted remote interface that has a lot of the nice UI feature you would expect from a first class UI like Claude Vscode extension (syntax highlighting, streaming, etc). You can self host it. But it's a little no dependencies node server that you can just npm install (npm i -g yepanywhere)
https://github.com/kzahel/yepanywhere