openclaw vs skills
Both are catalogued under Tools & Integrations. The figures come from the GitHub API; the assessments are ours.
openclawA single-operator assistant that runs as a local Gateway and reaches you in the chat apps you use.OfficialMIT
skillsGoogle's own Agent Skills for Google Cloud, Ads and AnalyticsOfficialApache-2.0At a glance
| At a glance | openclaw | skills |
|---|---|---|
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Languages | TypeScript | Python |
| Deployment | Self-hosted / Runs locally | Runs locally |
| Maturity | Growing | Growing |
| Stars | 386k | 18.3k |
| Star growth over the last 7 days | — | — |
| Forks | 81.2k | 1.4k |
| Open issues | 5.5k | 32 |
| Last commit | 16 Aug 2026 | 14 Aug 2026 |
| Activity | Active | Active |
What each one does
openclaw
OpenClaw installs a Gateway on your own machine and makes it the local control plane for sessions, tools, events and channel connections, so the Control UI, CLI, TUI and every connected messaging channel drive the same assistant. Models can be hosted or local, and the project expects new capabilities to arrive as plugins built on the plugin SDK rather than as changes to the core. The constraints are stated plainly in the README: it is designed for a single operator, tools run on the host for the main session unless you configure sandboxing, and DM-capable channels leave the assistant reachable by unknown senders until you approve a pairing with `openclaw pairing approve <channel> <code>`. The README tells you to read the security, exposure and sandboxing guides before connecting other users or exposing the Gateway remotely, which is a fair signal that shared or multi-user deployment is not the case it was built for.
Full entry →skills
Over a hundred skill directories of Google's own written guidance, installed selectively with `npx skills add google/skills`. The bulk sits under `skills/cloud` — GKE, BigQuery, Agent Platform, the six Well-Architected pillars — while `skills/ads` and `skills/analytics` cover the Google Ads API, the Mobile Ads and IMA SDKs and the two Google Analytics APIs. Depth is uneven: `skills/cloud/gke-*` accounts for twenty-nine directories on its own, Cloud Run and Firebase get one each, and the README labels the repository as under active development. A stack on neither Google Cloud nor Google's ads and analytics products gets nothing here, and app-side coverage stops at the Mobile Ads SDK — Android, Flutter, Dart, Genkit and ADK skills are separate repositories the README only links to.
Full entry →What you can do
openclaw
- Talk to it from the chat apps you already use — Channels connect WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Google Chat, Signal and iMessage to the same Gateway. Inbound messages are treated as untrusted input, and unknown senders on DM-capable channels stay unpaired until you run
openclaw pairing approve <channel> <code>. - Go from install to a working assistant in three commands —
curl -fsSL https://openclaw.ai/install.sh | bash(oriwr -useb https://openclaw.ai/install.ps1 | iexon Windows PowerShell) provisions a Node runtime when needed; thenopenclaw onboard --install-daemonverifies model access and creates the workspace, andopenclaw dashboardopens the Control UI. Installing vianpm install -g openclaw@latestinstead requires Node 22.22.3+, 24.15+ or 25.9+. - Drive the same session from terminal or browser — The Control UI, CLI and TUI are all clients of the Gateway, and
openclaw gateway statusreports whether the local Gateway is running. - Extend it without forking the core — Tools, skills and plugins are the extension points; the README states that new capabilities usually belong in plugins built on the plugin SDK and shared through ClawHub rather than merged into the main repository.
- Attach device hardware through companion apps and nodes — Companion apps and device nodes connect to the Gateway to add voice, Canvas, camera, screen and device-local actions, but only on supported platforms — the per-platform setup is documented separately under
docs.openclaw.ai/platformsanddocs.openclaw.ai/nodes, not in the core install flow.
skills
- Install only the skills you want —
npx skills add google/skillslets you select which skill directories to install rather than dropping the whole catalogue into the agent; the README's Available Skills section, between itsBEGIN SKILLSandEND SKILLSmarkers, lists every one by product area with a link to its directory. - Register it as a harness plugin —
claude plugin marketplace add google/skillsthenclaude plugin install <plugin>@google-pluginsinstalls bundles that pair skills with MCP servers; Codex usescodex plugin marketplace add google/skillsand its/pluginsbrowser, and Antigravity CLI takesagy plugin install https://github.com/google/skills/<plugin-path>. - Hand an agent the GKE material — The
skills/cloud/gke-*set covers cluster creation, ComputeClasses, the cluster autoscaler, multi-tenancy, networking, storage and upgrades, with failure modes split into their own skills such asgke-ai-troubleshooting-jobset-interruptionandgke-ai-troubleshooting-tpu-vbar-oom. - Make it write the queries —
cloud-logging-query-generationproduces Logging Query Language,cloud-monitoring-list-time-series-requestassembles ListTimeSeries requests andcloud-monitoring-chart-generationbuilds charts, whilebigquery-basics,spanner-basics,bigquery-bigframesandmanaged-airflow-dag-authoringcover the data side. - Work the Ads and Analytics APIs —
skills/adsholds thirteen skills —google-ads-api-quickstart,google-ads-api-account-diagnostics,google-ads-api-mcp-setup,data-manager-api-setup/-event-ingestion/-audience-ingestion, five Google Mobile Ads SDK skills includinggoogle-mobile-ads-android-migrate-to-next-gen, andima-sdk-client-side/ima-dai-sdkfor video — andskills/analyticsaddsgoogle-analytics-admin-api-basicsandgoogle-analytics-data-api-basics, all of it outside theskills/cloudtree.