The zero-cost alternative to OpenClaw. No LLM. No API bills. No prompt injection. Runs on any machine.
While OpenClaw users are burning $200/day and $3,600/month on API tokens, SafeClaw delivers 90% of the functionality using traditional programming — rule-based parsing, ML pipelines, and local-first tools. Your API bill: $0. Forever.
SafeClaw uses VADER, spaCy, sumy, YOLO, Whisper, Piper, and other battle-tested ML techniques instead of generative AI. The result: deterministic, predictable, private, and completely free to run.
| SafeClaw | OpenClaw | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | $0 | $100–$3,600+ |
| Requires LLM | No | Yes |
| Prompt injection risk | None | Yes |
| Works offline | Yes (core features) | No |
| Runs on any machine | Yes (Linux, macOS, Windows) | Needs powerful hardware or cloud APIs |
| Deterministic output | Yes | No (LLM responses vary) |
| Privacy | Local by default (external only when you ask, e.g. weather) | Data sent to API providers |
- Speech-to-Text — Whisper STT runs locally, no cloud transcription
- Text-to-Speech — Piper TTS for natural voice output, completely offline
- Voice-first workflow — Talk to SafeClaw like you would any assistant
- Smart home integration — Control your connected devices
- Bluetooth device control — Discover and manage Bluetooth devices
- Network scanning — Device discovery on your local network
- Twitter/X summarization — Add accounts, get summaries of their activity
- Mastodon summarization — Follow and summarize fediverse accounts
- Bluesky summarization — Track and summarize Bluesky feeds
- No API tokens needed for public content
- 50+ preset feeds — Hacker News, Ars Technica, BBC, Reuters, Nature, and more
- 8 categories — Tech, World, Science, Business, Programming, Security, Linux, AI
- Custom feeds — Import any RSS/Atom feed
- Auto-summarization — Extractive summaries with sumy (no AI)
- Per-user preferences — Customize your news sources
- Self-hosted by default — Your data stays local unless you explicitly request external info (like weather)
- No API keys required — Core features work completely offline
- No cloud AI dependencies — No tokens sent to OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google
- No prompt injection — No LLM means no injection attacks
- CLI — Interactive command line with Rich formatting
- Telegram — Full bot integration
- Discord — Coming soon
- Slack — Coming soon
- Webhooks — Inbound and outbound support
- Command chaining — Combine actions naturally: "read my email and remind me at 3pm"
- Web crawling — Async crawling with depth limits and domain filtering
- Summarization — LexRank, TextRank, LSA, Luhn algorithms
- Reminders — Natural language time parsing with dateparser
- Shell commands — Sandboxed command execution
- File operations — Search, list, read files
- Cron jobs — Scheduled task automation
- Daily briefings — Weather, reminders, news from your feeds
- VADER Sentiment — Lexicon-based sentiment analysis
- Keyword Extraction — TF-IDF style extraction
- Readability Scoring — Flesch-Kincaid metrics
- IMAP Support — Read emails from Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo
- SMTP Support — Send emails
- Standard protocols — No API keys required
- ICS Files — Import and parse .ics calendar files
- CalDAV — Connect to Google Calendar, iCloud (optional)
- Event filtering — Today, upcoming, by date range
- PDF — Text extraction with PyMuPDF
- DOCX — Microsoft Word documents
- HTML/Markdown/TXT — Plain text formats
- Desktop notifications — Cross-platform (macOS, Windows, Linux)
- Priority levels — Low, normal, high, urgent
- Rate limiting — Prevent notification spam
- NLP — spaCy named entity recognition (~50MB)
- Vision — YOLO object detection + OCR (~2GB)
- OCR — Tesseract text extraction from images (lightweight)
- Built-in personality and hidden surprises — because tools should be fun
| Feature | SafeClaw | OpenClaw |
|---|---|---|
| Self-hosted | ✅ | ✅ |
| Cross-platform (Linux, macOS, Windows) | ✅ | ✅ |
| No AI/LLM required | ✅ | ❌ |
| Offline capable | ✅ | ❌ |
| Zero API cost | ✅ | ❌ |
| No prompt injection | ✅ | ❌ |
| Privacy-first | ✅ (local by default) | ✅ |
| Voice (STT/TTS) | ✅ (Whisper + Piper, local) | ✅ (ElevenLabs, paid API) |
| Smart home control | ✅ | ✅ (via skills) |
| Bluetooth control | ✅ | ❌ |
| Network scanning | ✅ | ❌ |
| Social media summaries | ✅ (Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky) | ❌ (requires separate skills) |
| Multi-channel | ✅ (CLI, Telegram, Webhooks) | ✅ (13+ platforms) |
| Web crawling | ✅ | ✅ |
| Summarization | ✅ (extractive) | ✅ (AI-generated) |
| RSS/News feeds | ✅ (50+ feeds) | ✅ (via skills) |
| Sentiment analysis | ✅ (VADER) | ✅ (AI) |
| Email integration | ✅ | ✅ |
| Calendar support | ✅ | ✅ |
| Document reading | ✅ | ✅ |
| Desktop notifications | ✅ | ✅ |
| Object detection | ✅ (YOLO) | ❌ |
| OCR | ✅ (Tesseract) | ❌ |
| Cron jobs | ✅ | ✅ |
| Webhooks | ✅ | ✅ |
| Plugin system | ✅ | ✅ (5,700+ skills) |
| Free-form chat | ❌ | ✅ |
| Creative writing | ❌ | ✅ |
| Command chaining | ✅ ("read email and remind me at 3pm") | ✅ |
| Autonomous multi-step tasks | ❌ | ✅ |
| Self-writing skills | ❌ | ✅ |
| Browser automation | ❌ | ✅ |
# Install pipx if needed
# Linux:
sudo apt install pipx
# macOS:
brew install pipx
pipx ensurepath
# Install SafeClaw
pipx install safeclaw# Create and activate venv
python3 -m venv ~/.safeclaw-venv
source ~/.safeclaw-venv/bin/activate
# Install SafeClaw
pip install safeclawgit clone https://github.com/princezuda/safeclaw.git
cd safeclaw
pip install -e .# NLP - spaCy named entity recognition (~50MB)
pip install safeclaw[nlp]
# Vision - YOLO object detection + OCR (~2GB, requires PyTorch)
pip install safeclaw[vision]
# OCR only - text extraction from images (lightweight, requires Tesseract)
pip install safeclaw[ocr]
# All ML features
pip install safeclaw[ml]Requirements: Python 3.11+, ~50MB disk (base), ~2GB additional for vision features. Runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows.
# Start interactive mode
safeclaw
# Or with verbose logging
safeclaw --verbose> news # Get headlines from enabled feeds
> news tech # Get tech news only
> news categories # See all available categories
> news enable science # Enable science feeds
> add feed https://blog.example.com/rss # Add custom feed
> summarize https://news.ycombinator.com
> crawl https://example.com
> remind me to call mom tomorrow at 3pm
> morning briefing # Includes news from your feeds!
> check my email # View inbox (requires setup)
> read my email and remind me at 3pm # Chain commands naturally
> calendar today # Today's events from .ics
> analyze sentiment of this text # VADER sentiment analysis
> read document.pdf # Extract text from documents
> help
# News
safeclaw news # Headlines from enabled categories
safeclaw news tech # Tech news only
safeclaw news --categories # List all categories
safeclaw news world -n 20 # 20 world news headlines
safeclaw news --add https://blog.example.com/rss --name "My Blog"
safeclaw news -s # With auto-summarization
# Summarize
safeclaw summarize https://example.com/article -n 5
# Crawl
safeclaw crawl https://example.com --depth 2
# Text analysis
safeclaw analyze "This product is amazing! I love it."
safeclaw analyze document.txt --no-readability
# Documents
safeclaw document report.pdf
safeclaw document paper.docx --summarize -n 5
safeclaw document notes.md --output extracted.txt
# Calendar
safeclaw calendar import --file calendar.ics
safeclaw calendar today
safeclaw calendar upcoming --days 14
# Webhooks
safeclaw webhook --port 8765
# Initialize config
safeclaw initSafeClaw looks for configuration in config/config.yaml:
safeclaw:
name: "SafeClaw"
language: "en"
timezone: "UTC"
channels:
cli:
enabled: true
webhook:
enabled: true
port: 8765
telegram:
enabled: false
token: "YOUR_BOT_TOKEN"
actions:
shell:
enabled: true
sandboxed: true
timeout: 30
files:
enabled: true
allowed_paths:
- "~"┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ SAFECLAW │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ │
│ ┌─────────────┐ ┌─────────────┐ ┌─────────────┐ ┌────────────┐ │
│ │ CHANNELS │ │ ACTIONS │ │ TRIGGERS │ │ CORE │ │
│ ├─────────────┤ ├─────────────┤ ├─────────────┤ ├────────────┤ │
│ │ • CLI │ │ • Files │ │ • Cron │ │ • Analyzer │ │
│ │ • Telegram │ │ • Shell │ │ • Webhooks │ │ • Documents│ │
│ │ • Webhooks │ │ • Crawl │ │ • Watchers │ │ • Notify │ │
│ │ • Discord │ │ • Summarize │ │ • Events │ │ • Feeds │ │
│ └─────────────┘ │ • Reminder │ └─────────────┘ │ • Crawler │ │
│ │ • Briefing │ │ • Summary │ │
│ ┌─────────────┐ │ • News/RSS │ ┌─────────────┐ │ • Voice │ │
│ │ VOICE │ │ • Email │ │ DEVICES │ │ • Social │ │
│ ├─────────────┤ │ • Calendar │ ├─────────────┤ └────────────┘ │
│ │ • Whisper │ │ • Social │ │ • Bluetooth │ │
│ │ • Piper TTS │ └─────────────┘ │ • Network │ │
│ └─────────────┘ │ • Smart Home│ │
│ └─────────────┘ │
│ │
│ ┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │
│ │ COMMAND PARSER │ │
│ │ Keyword + Regex + Fuzzy Match + Date Parser + NLP │ │
│ └───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │
│ │
│ ┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │
│ │ MEMORY (SQLite) │ │
│ │ History • Preferences • Reminders • Cache • Events │ │
│ └───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Instead of burning tokens on LLMs, SafeClaw uses:
- Keyword matching — Fast lookup of command keywords
- Regex patterns — Structured extraction of parameters
- Fuzzy matching — Typo tolerance with rapidfuzz
- Date parsing — Natural language dates with dateparser
# Example: "remind me to call mom tomorrow at 3pm"
# → intent: "reminder"
# → params: {task: "call mom", time: "tomorrow at 3pm"}
# → entities: {datetime: 2024-01-16 15:00:00}
Fully local voice processing — no cloud APIs, no per-minute billing:
- Whisper STT — OpenAI's Whisper model running locally for speech recognition
- Piper TTS — Fast, high-quality text-to-speech with multiple voice options
Uses sumy's extractive algorithms:
- LexRank — Graph-based, like PageRank for sentences
- TextRank — Word co-occurrence graphs
- LSA — Latent Semantic Analysis
- Luhn — Statistical word frequency
No neural networks, no API calls — pure math.
Add Twitter, Mastodon, or Bluesky accounts and get extractive summaries of their recent posts. No API tokens needed for public content. Useful for tracking industry voices, news accounts, or competitors without doomscrolling.
Async crawling with httpx + BeautifulSoup:
- Single page link extraction
- Multi-page crawling with depth limits
- Domain filtering and pattern matching
- Built-in caching
from safeclaw.actions.base import BaseAction
class MyAction(BaseAction):
name = "myaction"
async def execute(self, params, user_id, channel, engine):
# Your logic here
return "Action completed!"
# Register it
engine.register_action("myaction", MyAction().execute)Add to config/intents.yaml:
intents:
deploy:
keywords: ["deploy", "release", "ship"]
patterns:
- "deploy to (production|staging)"
examples:
- "deploy to production"
action: "webhook"Plugins are automatically loaded from the plugins directory:
src/safeclaw/plugins/
├── official/ # Curated, tested plugins
│ └── smarthome.py
├── community/ # User-contributed plugins
│ └── your_plugin.py
├── base.py # BasePlugin class
└── loader.py # Plugin loader
SafeClaw is for you if:
- You want automation without API bills
- You're tired of unpredictable OpenClaw costs
- Privacy matters to you — your data stays local by default
- You prefer deterministic, predictable behavior
- You want voice control without paying for ElevenLabs
- You need social media monitoring without the doomscroll
- You want smart home and Bluetooth control in one tool
- You don't need free-form AI conversation
Stick with OpenClaw if:
- You need autonomous multi-step reasoning
- Free-form conversation is essential
- You want the AI to write its own skills
- Browser automation is a core need
# Clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/princezuda/safeclaw.git
cd safeclaw
# Install dev dependencies
pip install -e ".[dev]"
# Run tests
pytest
# Type checking
mypy src/safeclaw
# Linting
ruff check src/safeclawMIT License — see LICENSE for details.
Contributions welcome! Areas we'd love help with:
- More channel adapters (Discord, Slack, Matrix)
- Smart home integrations (Home Assistant, Philips Hue)
- Better intent patterns
- Additional social media platforms
- Documentation improvements
- Tests and CI/CD
- Whisper — Local speech-to-text
- Piper — Local text-to-speech
- sumy — Extractive summarization
- VADER — Sentiment analysis
- feedparser — RSS/Atom feed parsing
- dateparser — Natural language date parsing
- rapidfuzz — Fast fuzzy matching
- httpx — Async HTTP client
- FastAPI — Webhook server
- Rich — Beautiful CLI output
- PyMuPDF — PDF parsing
- python-docx — DOCX parsing
- icalendar — ICS calendar parsing
- desktop-notifier — Cross-platform notifications
- spaCy — Named entity recognition
- YOLO — Object detection
SafeClaw — Because your assistant shouldn't cost more than your rent. 🐾
