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What is Paperclip?

If OpenClaw is an employee, Paperclip is the company

Paperclip is a Node.js server and React UI that orchestrates a team of AI agents to run a business. Bring your own agents, assign goals, and track your agents' work and costs from one dashboard.

It looks like a task manager — but under the hood it has org charts, budgets, governance, goal alignment, and agent coordination.

Three steps to an autonomous company:

	Step	Example
01	Define the goal	"Build the #1 AI note-taking app to $1M MRR."
02	Hire the team	CEO, CTO, engineers, designers, marketers — any bot, any provider.
03	Approve and run	Review strategy. Set budgets. Hit go. Monitor from the dashboard.

COMING SOON: Clipmart — Download and run entire companies with one click. Browse pre-built company templates — full org structures, agent configs, and skills — and import them into your Paperclip instance in seconds.

Works with

OpenClaw

Claude Code

Codex

Cursor

Bash

HTTP

If it can receive a heartbeat, it's hired.

Paperclip is right for you if

• ✅ You want to build autonomous AI companies
• ✅ You coordinate many different agents (OpenClaw, Codex, Claude, Cursor) toward a common goal
• ✅ You have 20 simultaneous Claude Code terminals open and lose track of what everyone is doing
• ✅ You want agents running autonomously 24/7, but still want to audit work and chime in when needed
• ✅ You want to monitor costs and enforce budgets
• ✅ You want a process for managing agents that feels like using a task manager
• ✅ You want to manage your autonomous businesses from your phone

Features

🔌 Bring Your Own Agent Any agent, any runtime, one org chart. If it can receive a heartbeat, it's hired.	🎯 Goal Alignment Every task traces back to the company mission. Agents know what to do and why.	💓 Heartbeats Agents wake on a schedule, check work, and act. Delegation flows up and down the org chart.
💰 Cost Control Monthly budgets per agent. When they hit the limit, they stop. No runaway costs.	🏢 Multi-Company One deployment, many companies. Complete data isolation. One control plane for your portfolio.	🎫 Ticket System Every conversation traced. Every decision explained. Full tool-call tracing and immutable audit log.
🛡️ Governance You're the board. Approve hires, override strategy, pause or terminate any agent — at any time.	📊 Org Chart Hierarchies, roles, reporting lines. Your agents have a boss, a title, and a job description.	📱 Mobile Ready Monitor and manage your autonomous businesses from anywhere.

What Paperclip is not

Not a chatbot.	Agents have jobs, not chat windows.
Not an agent framework.	We don't tell you how to build agents. We tell you how to run a company made of them.
Not a workflow builder.	No drag-and-drop pipelines. Paperclip models companies — with org charts, goals, budgets, and governance.
Not a prompt manager.	Agents bring their own prompts, models, and runtimes. Paperclip manages the organization they work in.
Not a single-agent tool.	This is for teams. If you have one agent, you probably don't need Paperclip. If you have twenty — you definitely do.

Quickstart

Open source. Self-hosted. No Paperclip account required.

npx paperclip onboard

Or manually:

git clone https://github.com/paperclip-dev/paperclip.git
cd paperclip
pnpm install
pnpm dev

This starts the API server at http://localhost:3100 and the UI at http://localhost:5173. An embedded PostgreSQL database is created automatically — no setup required.

With Docker

docker compose up --build

Requirements: Node.js 20+, pnpm 9.15+

Architecture

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                    You (the board)                    │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                  Paperclip (control plane)            │
│                                                      │
│   Dashboard · Org Chart · Tasks · Goals · Budgets    │
│   Approvals · Activity Log · Cost Tracking           │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                    Adapters                           │
│                                                      │
│   Claude  ·  OpenClaw  ·  Codex  ·  Cursor  ·  HTTP │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Paperclip is the control plane, not the execution plane. Agents run wherever they run and phone home. Adapters connect Paperclip to any execution environment.

Stack: TypeScript · Express · React 19 · PostgreSQL · Drizzle ORM · TailwindCSS

FAQ

How is Paperclip different from agents like OpenClaw or Claude Code? Paperclip uses those agents. It orchestrates them into a company — with org charts, budgets, goals, governance, and accountability.

Can I use my existing agents? Yes. Paperclip is unopinionated about agent runtimes. Your agents can be Claude Code sessions, OpenClaw bots, Python scripts, shell commands, HTTP webhooks — anything that can receive a heartbeat signal. Adapters connect Paperclip to whatever execution environment you use.

What happens when an agent hits its budget limit? The agent auto-pauses and new tasks are blocked. You get a soft warning at 80%. As the board, you can override the limit at any time.

Do agents run continuously? By default, agents run on scheduled heartbeats and event-based triggers (task assignment, @-mentions). You can also hook in continuous agents like OpenClaw.

Can I run multiple companies? Yes. A single deployment can run dozens of companies with complete data isolation. Useful for separate ventures, testing strategies in parallel, or templating org configs for reuse.

What does a typical setup look like? Locally, a single Node.js process manages an embedded Postgres and local file storage. For production, point it at your own Postgres and deploy however you like. Configure projects, agents, and goals — the agents take care of the rest.

Comparison

	Paperclip	Agent frameworks (LangChain, CrewAI)	Single-agent tools (Claude Code, Cursor)
Multi-agent orchestration	Yes	Partial	No
Org structure & hierarchy	Yes	No	No
Cost control & budgets	Yes	No	No
Goal alignment	Yes	No	No
Governance & approvals	Yes	No	No
Multi-company	Yes	No	No
Agent-agnostic	Yes	Framework-locked	Single provider
Ticket-based work tracking	Yes	No	No

Development

pnpm dev              # Full dev (API + UI)
pnpm dev:server       # Server only
pnpm dev:ui           # UI only
pnpm build            # Build all
pnpm typecheck        # Type checking
pnpm test:run         # Run tests
pnpm db:generate      # Generate DB migration
pnpm db:migrate       # Apply migrations

See doc/DEVELOPING.md for the full development guide.

Contributing

We welcome contributions. See the contributing guide for details.

Community

• Discord — chat, questions, show & tell
• GitHub Issues — bugs and feature requests
• GitHub Discussions — ideas and RFC

License

MIT © 2026 Paperclip

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_{Open source under MIT. Built for people who want to run companies, not babysit agents.}