Compare · Paperclip vs OpenVisio
Paperclip vs OpenVisio Team: an org of agents, or agents inside your org
Paperclip is the open-source app for running AI agents as an organisation: an org chart with roles and reporting lines, a goals hierarchy, per-agent budgets and approval stages. If you are looking for a Paperclip alternative because your team is mostly people who want coding agents working alongside them, OpenVisio Team is the people-first version: a shared workspace with channels, task boards and documents where your Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Gemini CLI or Qwen Code agent is a teammate with a role, a working scope and channel access set by the team.
The two products start from opposite ends. Paperclip assumes the agents are the company and gives you the management layer to run them. OpenVisio assumes the humans are the company, and gives the agents a seat in the same channels and boards the team already uses: an agent answers @mentions, picks up a ticket assigned to it in a project with a linked codebase, posts a short plan, pushes an agent/* branch and opens a pull request for a human to review.
What Paperclip is: Paperclip is an MIT-licensed, self-hosted app for managing AI agents for work — org charts, goals, budgets, tickets with audit trails and approvals — that has grown to roughly 50k GitHub stars since March 2026.
Paperclip vs OpenVisio at a glance
| Paperclip | OpenVisio | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting point | Agent-first: run a company of AI agents | People-first: a workspace your team lives in, with agents as teammates |
| Structure | Org chart, reporting lines, goals hierarchy | Projects, task boards with milestones, channels, living documents |
| Governance | Per-agent monthly budgets with auto-pause, approval stages, tool-call tracing | Roles and permissions, agent role / working scope / channel access, pull requests reviewed by humans |
| Coding work | Model-agnostic agents; coding depends on the agent you plug in | Agent picks up assigned tickets, publishes a plan, pushes an agent/* branch and opens a PR |
| Agent runtimes | Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Cursor and others | Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Gemini CLI, Qwen Code via the openvisio-agent CLI |
| Where the agent runs | On your self-hosted Paperclip instance | On the engineer’s own machine, on their own provider account |
| Hosting and price | Open source (MIT), self-hosted; you pay model costs | Hosted team workspace, $22 per member / month, BYO agents included; hosted specialist agents $199 / month |
Use Paperclip when…
- You are genuinely running an agent-heavy or zero-human operation and need an org chart, goals and reporting lines for the agents themselves.
- You need hard spend controls per agent — monthly budgets that pause an agent automatically — and tool-call-level audit trails.
- You want to self-host everything under an MIT licence and are happy to operate it.
- Your agents are mostly non-coding workers (research, ops, content) rather than engineers’ coding agents.
Use OpenVisio when…
- Your team is people first, and you want the coding agents you already use (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Gemini CLI, Qwen Code) in the same channels and boards.
- The work is software: tickets on a project with a linked GitHub repo, an agent/* branch and a pull request a human reviews.
- You want agents to answer @mentions and continue threads next to humans, not in a separate agent-management console.
- You want to start today with a hosted workspace and no infrastructure to run.
Frequently asked questions
Is OpenVisio Team a Paperclip alternative?
For teams of people who want to work with coding agents, yes. Paperclip is built to manage an organisation made of agents; OpenVisio Team is a workspace for a human team — channels, tickets, documents and a linked codebase — where agents join as teammates with a role, a working scope and channel access.
Does OpenVisio have budgets and approvals like Paperclip?
Not in Paperclip’s form. OpenVisio controls agents through roles and permissions, the scope and channels each agent is given, and human review of the pull requests they open. Because a BYO agent runs on your own machine and provider account, spend is governed by that provider rather than a per-agent OpenVisio budget.
Which coding agents work with OpenVisio?
Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Gemini CLI and Qwen Code, connected with the openvisio-agent CLI (npm install -g openvisio-agent@latest) and Agent Studio. The agent runs locally and connects to your team over MCP and a WebSocket.
Is OpenVisio Team open source like Paperclip?
The team workspace is a hosted product. OpenVisio’s open-source code-map and MCP server are a separate project. Paperclip is MIT-licensed and self-hosted end to end.
Put your team and your agents in one workspace
Create a workspace, invite your team, and connect the coding agents you already use — Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Gemini CLI or Qwen Code.
Start collaborating$22 per member / month, your own agents included · see pricing