Open Dots vs MausBot: three open source dots, one app

What “open dots” means on GitHub

OpenAI’s dots are always-on personal agents for ChatGPT Pro and Business Premium subscribers, which is to say $100 a month and up, and not in the EEA, Switzerland or the UK. The Register reported on October 7 that the launch “inspired open source imitators amid technical difficulties”. Four repositories took the name within 26 hours. Here is what each one is, from its own repository, read on October 8.

open-dot, by Composio

composio-community/open-dot is the work of Prathit Joshi, a growth engineer at Composio, and was announced by Composio co-founder Karan Vaidya in a tweet seen 235,000 times. It is an Electron window around a local Next.js server, for Apple Silicon Macs only, and you build the DMG yourself. It takes an OpenAI key, or an OpenRouter key for open models, gives each dot a persistent Chrome profile with live view and takeover, connects 1,500 apps and event triggers through Composio, keeps passwords in the macOS Keychain and types them into pages so the model never sees them, and routes risky actions through rules you write and a small review model that produces approve or deny cards. That is a wide feature list for a repository with four commits, all on September 29 and 30, and nothing since. It has no licence file. A user who asked permission to publish a Windows build got “yes, feel free” in an issue, which is kind, and is not a licence. Eight community pull requests, including sign in with ChatGPT and local models, sit unreviewed.

Open Dots, by Anil Matcha

Anil-matcha/open-dots has the most stars of the three, 5,517, and the strangest history. The GitHub API says the repository was created on May 25, 2023, and its pull request list still contains 2023 patches from a privateGPT fork. It was renamed on launch day, announced in a tweet seen 173,000 times, and did trend on GitHub. On October 7 its main branch was force-replaced: the current root commit has no parents, and the September 30 merge that fixed a burst of reported security issues has no common ancestor with it. The product changed with the history. The version that launched was a local Next.js and FastAPI workspace with personas and a deny-by-default action gateway; the version on main today is a FastAPI API, a Telegram bot and a web UI that runs Claude Code in Boat cloud sandboxes, Claude only, by OAuth login, with a permission hook that times out to deny. The README now positions it against dots, Muse, Grok Bot, Instinct, Cue and Cowork at once, in commits literally named “position Open Dots as paid agent alternative”. The licence file that the October 3 snapshot had is gone from the tree, though the description still says MIT.

OpenDots, by CopilotKit

CopilotKit/OpenDots is the serious one: 4,270 stars, MIT, 53 commits in the last 30 days, a company behind it. It is a web template for always-on coworkers that move between text, calls and Slack, each with a computer from CopilotKit’s OpenBot containers. The README says it plainly: “a template, not a hosted product”. Conversations require CopilotKit Intelligence, which by default means CopilotKit’s cloud, with a free tier of 200 threads kept for three days and paid tiers at $39 a month and $100 a seat, and telemetry on unless you set a flag. Multi-dot group chat and delegation are listed as further work. It is the best open-source code in this group, and it is a developer’s starting point rather than a thing a person installs.

For completeness: Digger’s opendots (19 stars, dead after launch day, agents on Digger’s own cloud) and Shashankss1205/OpenDots (26 stars, a one-day Python runtime) exist. feder-cr/invisible_dots, with 31,817 stars, also positions itself as the open-source dots, on a repository created in 2024 for a different purpose; it gives each dot a QEMU virtual machine and an anti-detection Firefox, on Windows and Linux only, and is a different kind of project.

Open Dots vs MausBot, side by side

What MausBot is, in the same terms

MausBot is a chat app where every contact is a bot. Each bot runs on the claude, codex or grok CLI installed on your own machine, with the login you already have, so a Claude bot and a Codex bot can share a room and hand work to each other. Shell commands and file edits surface as Allow / Deny cards before they run, by default, for every engine. Your conversations, memory and files stay in ~/.openmausbot on your disk; the harness listens on 127.0.0.1 only. It ships as signed installers for macOS, Windows and Ubuntu, with iOS and Android apps in the stores, and 500+ connected apps over Composio, the same catalogue open-dot uses. The code is on GitHub under Apache 2.0, app and harness, with no vendor service in the path. Cloud plans from $29 a month keep bots working with the laptop closed; the free app needs no account.

What the Open Dots projects still do better

• open-dot has Composio event triggers, so a bank email or a new GitHub issue can wake a dot; MausBot’s routines are on a schedule. Its Keychain vault that types passwords into pages without the model seeing them is a design MausBot has deliberately not shipped, because a bot that controls the browser can read what the browser shows. open-dot also has voice calls over OpenAI’s realtime API.
• Open Dots lets you drive a Claude Code session from Telegram with approval buttons in the chat, on a Claude subscription rather than an API key, with permission rules scoped per git verb so “always allow commit” does not allow push.
• OpenDots has WebRTC calls, Slack through the Channels SDK, and a durable task engine, and it is maintained daily by a funded team.

The verdict

Judge the four on what a person can do today. Two of the three Open Dots cannot be legally redistributed because they have no licence. None of the three installs: you build a Mac app, run a Docker stack, or deploy a template. Each is tied to one model vendor. Two are single-agent. One has not had a commit in eight days; one replaced its history and its product in the same week. MausBot is the only one in the table that is open source under an OSI licence, ships installers and store apps, runs any model per bot on the plan you already pay for, gates shell commands by default, and has been committed to daily since August. For the searcher typing “open dots”, it is the one that works.

Frequently asked questions

Is there an open source OpenAI dots?

Three projects claim the name and none is quite that. As of October 8, 2026, Composio’s open-dot and Anil Matcha’s Open Dots have no licence file, which in law means all rights reserved; CopilotKit’s OpenDots is MIT but cannot run without CopilotKit’s hosted Intelligence service. MausBot is Apache 2.0, app and harness, and runs with no vendor service.

What is the difference between open-dot, Open Dots and OpenDots?

open-dot (one t) is Composio’s Mac app, launched by Karan Vaidya on September 30. Open Dots is Anil Matcha’s repository, launched September 29 and rebuilt since. OpenDots is CopilotKit’s web template, launched the same day. They share nothing but the name and the launch week.

Which one runs on Windows?

Only Anil Matcha’s, as a Docker stack with a Telegram bot and no desktop app. open-dot is macOS only and OpenDots is a web template. MausBot ships a native Windows installer.

Does MausBot use any Open Dots code?

No. MausBot started on August 11, 2026, seven weeks before dots existed, and is an independent codebase under Apache 2.0.

Is any of them cheaper than OpenAI’s dots?

They are all free to download and you pay a model provider. open-dot’s launch tweet claimed a tenth of the cost; nothing in the repository substantiates a figure. MausBot runs bots on the Claude, ChatGPT or Grok plan you already pay for, so the marginal cost of a bot is zero.

Read next

• Open Dots vs MausBot, the one-page summary of this comparison.
• The open source alternative to OpenAI’s dots, which compares MausBot with dots itself.
• Every open source AI agent app, compared, the round-up.