The open-source AI employee alternative you can own

A vendor demo shows the agent doing the job. It rarely shows the file that says what the job is. That file matters more than the demo, because it is what you would edit when the job changes, and what a reviewer reads before the agent touches a customer record.

Three questions separate these products faster than any feature list. Who holds the role definition? Who holds the memory that makes shift 50 smarter than shift 1? Who holds the record of what the agent did, and who approved it? When all three answers name the vendor, you are renting a role. When all three name your repo, you own one.

That is the split this page measures. The vendors here all do real work. They differ on where the work is defined, and that difference shows up on the day you want to change something.

Sintra sells role-based employees with names. Soshie writes and schedules social posts, Cassie answers comments, Vizzy preps your meetings, and a wider roster stands behind them. Setup is deliberately non-technical: add the business once, connect your tools, set guidelines and approval levels, and the page promises "no complex configuration, no technical setup".

That suits a solo founder or a five-person team with no engineer to spare, especially one selling across borders. Sintra advertises more than 100 languages, and a named helper for each function is easier to hand to a non-technical colleague than a blank manifest.

The handover is where it stops. The role setup, the brand context and whatever each employee learns from your work sit in Sintra's workspace, and nothing on the page describes taking that material with you. Leaving means rebuilding the team from memory.

CellCog comes closest of the three to the model Kortix argues for. You brief a role in a sentence, the employee gets its own inbox, task board and memory, and anything risky waits behind an approval card. It also runs on the Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor subscription you already pay for, which is a real cost argument.

It fits a team already paying for one of those subscriptions and wanting a named employee on real shifts without signing another model contract. The employee is still CellCog's, though: the brief, the memory, the org chart and the permission list live in its console, and the work runs on its cloud computer or on your machine under its approval card.

Teammates.ai is the easiest of the three to price and to start. Raya covers customer service, Adam covers sales, Sara covers recruiting, three employees come from $25 a month, and a free plan exists. You connect tools over OAuth, upload documents to set brand voice, and the page puts the whole setup under five minutes.

Choose it when those three functions are the job and you want a bill you can read before you sign. The ceiling is the roster itself. Three fixed roles, defined and remembered on Teammates.ai's platform, and the page publishes no approval model for the work they do.

AI Employee (home.aiemployee.com) is another hosted, closed product. Chat, voice calls and video avatar are surfaces that depend on your plan and configuration.

Slack Agentforce lives inside Slack and Salesforce. That is the shortest path for a company already running both, and the longest for one that is not.

Ema sells to enterprises on outcomes and publishes no price, so the first conversation is a sales call rather than a checkout page.

Plenty of teams should buy one of those three, and the useful version of this page says so plainly.

If nobody on your side wants to own upgrades, secrets, backups and the occasional broken connector, buy a hosted employee. Self-hosting moves that work onto your team. A two-person company with no engineer will feel it in the first month, and the time saved by owning the repo will not cover the time spent running it.

The same goes for the shape of the job. When the work is a fixed flowchart, the same steps in the same order every time, a workflow builder does it with less ceremony. When all you want is a chat window over your documents, a chat product is cheaper and faster to stand up. Kortix earns its place on open-ended work that needs a role, a memory and an approval gate, and on teams that want those three in their own repo.

Write these down before the next demo and ask each vendor to answer them in writing.

1. If we cancel next quarter, what do we still have? A repo we can read, or a login that stops working?
2. Can we read the rule that decides which tool the agent may call, and change it without a support ticket?
3. Where does the memory sit, and who can read it?

A vendor that answers all three with a link to something you control is selling you an asset. One that answers with a settings screen is selling you a subscription. Both are legitimate businesses. Only one of them leaves you with the employee.

The Kortix column starts with a file, not a promise.

1# kortix.yaml2agents:3  support-triage:4    file: agents/support-triage.md   # what it does, in plain markdown5    connectors: all                  # what it may reach

That block names the role and its reach. The role file beside it holds the instructions, and the rest of the employee follows the same pattern: memory files, connector configuration and triggers live in the repo and change through a diff someone reviews. Approval gates you set. Off until you set them. A call you mark Ask stops until a person approves it, then the agent resumes.

The repo also travels. Run it on Kortix Cloud, in your VPC, or on your own on-prem network. Self-host is free. Any model provider with your own keys. None of that changes the manifest, which is the point of keeping it in git.