# Open-source orchestration for zero-human companies
**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.
| **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. |
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> **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.
| ❌ You have 20 Claude Code tabs open and can't track which one does what. On reboot you lose everything. | ✅ Tasks are ticket-based, conversations are threaded, sessions persist across reboots. |
| ❌ You manually gather context from several places to remind your bot what you're actually doing. | ✅ Context flows from the task up through the project and company goals — your agent always knows what to do and why. |
| ❌ Folders of agent configs are disorganized and you're re-inventing task management, communication, and coordination between agents. | ✅ Paperclip gives you org charts, ticketing, delegation, and governance out of the box — so you run a company, not a pile of scripts. |
| ❌ Runaway loops waste hundreds of dollars of tokens and max your quota before you even know what happened. | ✅ Cost tracking surfaces token budgets and throttles agents when they're out. Management prioritizes with budgets. |
| ❌ You have recurring jobs (customer support, social, reports) and have to remember to manually kick them off. | ✅ Heartbeats handle regular work on a schedule. Management supervises. |
| ❌ You have an idea, you have to find your repo, fire up Claude Code, keep a tab open, and babysit it. | ✅ Add a task in Paperclip. Your coding agent works on it until it's done. Management reviews their work. |
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## Why Paperclip is special
Paperclip handles the hard orchestration details correctly.
| **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. |
| **Not a code review tool.** | Paperclip orchestrates work, not pull requests. Bring your own review process. |
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## Quickstart
Open source. Self-hosted. No Paperclip account required.
This starts the API server at `http://localhost:3100`. An embedded PostgreSQL database is created automatically — no setup required.
> **Requirements:** Node.js 20+, pnpm 9.15+
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## FAQ
**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.
If you're a solo-entreprenuer you can use Tailscale to access Paperclip on the go. Then later you can deploy to e.g. Vercel when you need it.
**Can I run multiple companies?**
Yes. A single deployment can run an unlimited number of companies with complete data isolation.
**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.
**Why should I use Paperclip instead of just pointing my OpenClaw to Asana or Trello?**
Agent orchestration has subtleties in how you coordinate who has work checked out, how to maintain sessions, monitoring costs, establishing governance - Paperclip does this for you.
(Bring-your-own-ticket-system is on the Roadmap)
**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. You bring your agent and Paperclip coordinates.
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## Development
```bash
pnpm dev # Full dev (API + UI, watch mode)
pnpm dev:once # Full dev without file watching
pnpm dev:server # Server 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](https://github.com/paperclipai/paperclip/blob/master/doc/DEVELOPING.md) for the full development guide.
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## Roadmap
- ✅ Plugin system (e.g. add a knowledge base, custom tracing, queues, etc)
- ✅ Get OpenClaw / claw-style agent employees
- ✅ companies.sh - import and export entire organizations
[](https://www.star-history.com/?repos=paperclipai%2Fpaperclip&type=date&legend=top-left)
