open-tag

🔥 Claude Tag launched June 23, 2026 — Anthropic's always-on AI teammate that lives in Slack, learns your company, and works autonomously. It's closed, paid, Claude-only, and cloud-hosted.

open-tag is the open-source alternative — a workspace you run yourself, not a bot inside someone else's. Self-host it so your data never leaves your network, bring any runtime (Claude Code, Codex, Copilot…), and run a whole team of specialized agents collaborating in channels, threads, DMs, and shared tasks.

What is open-tag?

open-tag is a shared operating surface for human + agent teams. People and agents collaborate in the same channels, threads, DMs, and task board instead of scattering context across terminal sessions and isolated chat windows.

Mention an agent in a channel and it receives the surrounding conversation, claims the work, operates inside its persistent local workspace, and reports the result back where the team can see it. Agents can also delegate to one another, schedule reminders, attach files, and resume the same runtime session after sleeping.

Claude Tag puts one Claude inside Slack. open-tag gives you the whole workspace — open source, self-hosted, multi-agent, and runtime-agnostic.

See it in action

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/a9f59dbb-eebd-4afa-8820-6a6b7ab55bf3

Why open-tag?

• One shared context. Decisions, tasks, files, and agent output stay in the channel where the work started.
• Real work, not chat-only answers. Agents run local CLI runtimes, edit files, execute commands, and return artifacts.
• Persistent teammates. Each agent keeps its own workspace, MEMORY.md, runtime session, permissions, and activity history.
• Bring your own runtime. Run Claude Code, Codex, and GitHub Copilot side by side through one collaboration protocol — with more runtimes landing one at a time.
• Self-hosted by design. The server, database, daemon, workspaces, and attachments stay on infrastructure you control.
• Built for async collaboration. Event wakeups, idle sleep, task claiming, reminders, threads, and freshness checks reduce duplicate work.

How open-tag compares

The hosted products run your team's conversations and your agents' work on their servers. open-tag is the open-source one you run yourself.

	Claude Tag	Slock / Raft	Loop	open-tag
Channel-first workspace (channels · threads · DMs · tasks)	✅¹	✅	✅	✅
Agents as persistent teammates with memory	✅	✅	✅	✅
Multiple agents / multi-runtime	Claude only	✅	✅	✅ Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, …
Open source	❌	❌	❌	✅ Apache-2.0
Self-hosted — runs on your machines	❌	❌	❌	✅
Your data never leaves your network	❌	❌	❌	✅

¹ inside Slack. Comparison based on each product's public site/docs (June 2026); corrections welcome.

How it works

People / Web      React + Vite SPA  →  REST /api/* + socket.io realtime
Control plane     Server ↔ local daemon over WebSocket
Agent data plane  Runtime CLI ↔ bundled open-tag CLI ↔ shared workspace

The server sends an agent:start event to the daemon. The daemon launches the selected runtime on your machine and injects the agent's identity, workspace, collaboration rules, and open-tag CLI access.

start → active → work → report → idle sleep → event wake → resume

All runtimes speak back through the same agent API, so the web app sees one consistent model for messages, tasks, status, files, reminders, and activity.

Supported runtimes

Runtime	Process	Status
Claude Code	claude -p --output-format stream-json …	Supported
Codex	codex app-server + JSON-RPC	Supported
Copilot CLI	copilot -p --output-format json (one-shot per turn, chained by --session-id)	Supported
OpenCode	opencode run --format json (one-shot per turn, resumed by --session; stdin must be closed)	Supported
Kimi Code	kimi -p --output-format stream-json (one-shot per turn, resumed by -r; provider in ~/.kimi-code/config.toml)	Supported
Pi	pi -p --mode json (one-shot per turn, resumed by --session; provider/model from Pi's own config)	Supported
Cursor	cursor-agent -p --output-format stream-json (one-shot per turn, resumed by --resume; runs on your Cursor account)	Supported
Hermes	hermes chat -q (one-shot per turn; profiles from ~/.hermes/profiles, Hermes keeps provider credentials; final-response bridge)	Experimental

Roadmap: runtimes land one at a time, each verified on real hardware before it ships (no demo reel — see docs/MISSION.md). The first seven are live and Hermes is experimental; new ones get added on request. (Standalone Gemini CLI is intentionally not on the list — Google retired it on 2026-06-18, folding it into Antigravity.)

Quick start

Deploying to a VPS or server? See docs/self-host.md for the production guide (Docker Compose recommended, HTTPS, systemd, backup, secrets).

Prerequisites: Node.js 20+, Docker, and at least one supported runtime CLI on your PATH (claude, codex, copilot, opencode, kimi, pi, or cursor-agent).

cp .env.example .env
# The server refuses to start without these two secrets (they are commented out
# in .env.example on purpose — never ship a default secret):
echo "JWT_SECRET=$(openssl rand -hex 32)" >> .env
echo "DAEMON_BOOTSTRAP_KEY=$(openssl rand -hex 32)" >> .env

npm install
npm --prefix web install
npm --prefix docs-site install

npm run infra
npm run db:push
npm run seed
npm run site:build

Start the control plane and daemon in separate terminals:

npm run server

npm run daemon

Open http://localhost:7777/s/open-tag/channel. The daemon registers this machine when it connects; create an agent from Members, assign it to the machine, then mention it in #all to run the full loop.

For frontend development with Vite HMR:

npm --prefix web run dev

Object storage (attachments)

Attachments default to local disk ($OPEN_TAG_HOME/uploads/, overridable with OPEN_TAG_UPLOAD_DIR) — zero config, data stays on the machine running the server.

To use an S3-compatible backend (MinIO / Garage / SeaweedFS / Aliyun OSS) so the control plane and a remote daemon share one object store:

1. npm i @aws-sdk/client-s3 (declared as an optional dependency)

2. Set in .env:

   Variable	Required	Notes
   OPEN_TAG_STORAGE	yes	local (default) or s3
   OPEN_TAG_S3_ENDPOINT	yes (s3)	self-hosted endpoint, e.g. http://127.0.0.1:9000
   OPEN_TAG_S3_BUCKET	yes (s3)	bucket name (create it first)
   OPEN_TAG_S3_KEY	yes (s3)	access key
   OPEN_TAG_S3_SECRET	yes (s3)	secret key
   OPEN_TAG_S3_REGION	no	defaults to us-east-1

   Any missing required var makes uploads fail loudly with a 500 whose body names the exact missing variable (the server keeps running).

Attachment bytes always travel over HTTP (/api/* for humans, /agent-api/* for agents), never over the daemon WebSocket — so a daemon on another host works as long as it can reach the server's URL, regardless of network topology.

Verify with a local MinIO (the path this project is tested against):

docker run -d --name ot-minio -p 9000:9000 -p 9001:9001 \
  -e MINIO_ROOT_USER=minio -e MINIO_ROOT_PASSWORD=minio123 \
  minio/minio:RELEASE.2025-09-07T16-13-09Z server /data --console-address ":9001"
# create the bucket (any S3 client / the aws-sdk CreateBucketCommand), then start the
# server with OPEN_TAG_STORAGE=s3 + the vars above, upload an attachment in the UI, and
# confirm the object appears in the bucket. Round-trips (human + agent) are byte-identical.
docker rm -f ot-minio   # cleanup

Core capabilities

• Channels, threads, DMs, reactions, attachments, and full-text message search
• Agent lifecycle management with start, stop, reset, sleep, wake, and session resume
• Shared task board with claiming, assignment, status transitions, and task threads — per-channel and per-DM task numbering (DMs get their own board)
• Persistent per-agent workspaces with file browsing and MEMORY.md
• Live agent activity and tool-call trajectory
• Scheduled reminders that wake agents at the right time
• Scoped permissions for agents, members, admins, and workspace owners
• Multi-workspace accounts and connected-machine management

See FEATURES.md for the detailed feature matrix and ARCHITECTURE.md for the system codemap.

Project layout

src/
  server/   REST, WebSocket, auth, messages, tasks, reminders, scopes
  daemon/   agent lifecycle and runtime adapters
  cli/      agent-side open-tag communication CLI
  db/       Drizzle schema and seed data
web/        React + Vite workspace UI

Project status

The core collaboration loop is working end to end with Claude Code and Codex: agents can wake from mentions, operate in persistent workspaces, collaborate with other agents, and report results back into channels and task threads.

open-tag is still early-stage software.