OpenClaw: guides & tutorials

OpenClaw and Hermes Agent are both self-hosted AI assistants you run on your own hardware — but they solve different problems. OpenClaw is a gateway that routes messages to an LLM and executes skills on demand. Hermes Agent is an autonomous agent with persistent memory and a learning loop that improves on repeated workflows. This post compares the two directly so you can choose the right tool for your setup.

OpenClaw is a self-hosted AI assistant gateway: it connects chat channels (Telegram, Discord, web, and more) and tools to an LLM you choose—often Ollama or vLLM on your own hardware, or a cloud API when you accept that tradeoff. It is not a foundation model; it is orchestration you run yourself.

In March 2026 the project drew unusual attention—including a milestone our editors cited in the weekly roundup (Top 10 AI and tech stories this week). This is time-stamped commentary, not a substitute for upstream docs: channel lists, defaults, and feature names change; confirm behavior, licensing, and security advisories in the official project before production. The piece separates what that attention reflects from what still depends on your own ops discipline, and shows where OpenClaw sits next to local inference, workflow automation, and data collection layers.

Healthcare teams spend hours on administrative tasks that AI assistants handle in seconds: summarizing patient notes, drafting prior authorization letters, scheduling coordination, reviewing lab results for follow-up actions. The problem is that mainstream AI assistants — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini — operate on shared cloud infrastructure. Sending PHI to them without a BAA and HIPAA-eligible configuration is a compliance violation.

OpenClaw with NemoClaw on LiquidWeb HIPAA infrastructure solves this. PHI stays on hardware you control, agent actions are sandboxed with kernel-level security, and your hosting provider will sign a BAA.

Self-hosting OpenClaw with a cloud API backend is easy. But cloud APIs have costs that scale with usage, and they receive every message you send. If your team uses OpenClaw heavily, or if data privacy is a concern, local GPU inference solves both problems: your data stays on your hardware, and you pay a flat server rate instead of per-token fees.

OpenClaw is a multi-platform AI assistant — web UI, API, Telegram, Discord, Slack, and more — all fronting a single LLM backend. Connect it to Ollama and your local model becomes usable everywhere: from your phone via Telegram, from code via API, from the web dashboard. No data leaves your machine. This guide covers setup, config, use cases, and connecting multiple backends (Ollama + Anthropic + OpenAI) on a Liquid Web VPS.

This guide takes you from a blank server to a fully running OpenClaw instance — accessible over HTTPS, connected to Telegram, with persistent storage and daily backups. Expect about 20 minutes start to finish.

OpenClaw is an open-source personal AI assistant you run on your own hardware. It connects to the messaging apps your team already uses — WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Signal — and can browse the web, execute tasks, and run on your choice of AI model. As of March 2026, it has 323,000+ GitHub stars, making it one of the most adopted self-hosted AI projects ever built.