[opensourcedex]

Paperclip is a free, open source ai assisted coding project written in TypeScript and released under MIT. It has 80,932 GitHub stars, 14,855 forks and 5,464 open issues, and was last pushed 3 hours ago. On this registry it ranks #4 of 24 tracked projects in AI Assisted Coding, with 5 head-to-head comparisons available. It gained 392 stars over the last 6 tracked days.

Paperclip — Org chart, budgets, and governance for AI agent teams

What is Paperclip?

What it is

Paperclip is an open-source orchestration platform for managing teams of AI agents in production environments. It lives in the Node.js and React ecosystem and is licensed under MIT. The project addresses the operational chaos that arises when deploying multiple autonomous AI agents—such as OpenClaw, Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor—across an organization. Without coordination, teams face untraceable workflows, runaway costs, misaligned goals, and poor governance. Paperclip solves this by providing a unified dashboard that enforces org structure, budget controls, goal alignment, and auditability across heterogeneous agents.

Key capabilities

  • Orchestrates heterogeneous agents via a single org chart, supporting any agent that accepts a heartbeat signal
  • Enforces agent budgets with hard cost limits per agent, halting execution upon threshold breach
  • Traces every task, decision, and tool call in an immutable audit log with full diff and screenshot review
  • Supports multi-organization deployments with complete data isolation under one control plane
  • Enables agent hiring, delegation, and role-based permissions for both human and agent employees
  • Provides goal alignment: all tasks link back to organizational objectives with traceable intent
  • Offers mobile-ready dashboards for monitoring and managing agent operations remotely

Who uses it and how

  • Teams running 24/7 autonomous agent operations use it to delegate tasks across roles (e.g., CEO, CTO, engineers) and audit outputs without manual intervention
  • Platform engineers deploy it to manage agent sandboxes, MCP servers, and cross-provider runtimes while enforcing RBAC and SSO
  • Product managers use it to define business goals, allocate budgets, and approve agent strategies before execution

Getting started

Paperclip runs as a Node.js server with a React frontend; deployment uses Docker images and standard package managers. The homepage at https://paperclip.ing links to quickstart docs and a Discord channel for support.

When to use it — and when not to

Paperclip replaces fragmented tooling for agent orchestration with a unified governance layer, but requires self-hosting infrastructure including a database and storage backend. It does not provide managed hosting or built-in SMTP, so operational overhead is nontrivial. It is unsuitable for single-agent experiments or ephemeral tasks where lightweight scripting suffices; its value emerges only at scale with complex, multi-agent workflows requiring auditability and cost control.

project readme (upstream, from github) — read inline

Quickstart · Docs · GitHub · Discord · Twitter · Website

MIT License Stars Star History Rank Discord



Paperclip is the app people use to manage AI agents for work.

Open-source orchestration for teams of AI agents.

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 work and costs from one dashboard.

It looks like a task manager. Under the hood: org charts, budgets, governance, goal alignment, and agent coordination.

Manage business goals, not pull requests.

Step Example
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.

Works
with
OpenClaw
Claude Code
Codex
Cursor
Bash
HTTP

If it can receive a heartbeat, it's hired.


Paperclip is right for you if

  • ✅ You want to build autonomous AI organizations
  • ✅ You coordinate many different agents (OpenClaw, Codex, Claude, Cursor) toward a common goal
  • ✅ You have 20 simultaneous Claude Code terminals open and lose track of what everyone is doing
  • ✅ You want agents running autonomously 24/7, but still want to audit work and chime in when needed
  • ✅ You want to monitor costs and enforce budgets
  • ✅ You want a process for managing agents that feels like using a task manager
  • ✅ You want to manage your autonomous businesses from your phone

The four pillars

Four things have to work for an organization of AI agents to actually produce: the tasks, the org, the training, and the infrastructure. Paperclip is built around exactly those four pillars.

The four pillars of Paperclip
Pillar Built for What it covers
Agentic Task Manager — Declare intent. Agents work. You verify the output. Everyone, daily Tasks, approvals & review gates · proactive agent coworkers · auditable routines & workflows · verify from diffs, screenshots & tests
Org Chart for Agents — Roles, permissions & boundaries for humans and agents. Managers Mixed human + agent org chart · responsibilities, delegation, specialization · governance: who can do what · scoped secrets & company boundaries
Agent Employee Training — Design, train & evaluate your AI employees. Enablers Skill Studio & shared org-wide skills · evals & saved test runs · active learning loops & quality metrics · performance reviews for agents
Agentic OS — The infrastructure that makes the work run. IT & platform Cross-provider runtime: any model, any agent · sandboxing, integrations & MCP servers · SSO, GRC, RBAC & cost controls · data privacy, internal trace collection, compounding data value

Features

🔌 Bring Your Own Agent

Any agent, any runtime, one org chart. If it can receive a heartbeat, it's hired.

🎯 Goal Alignment

Every task traces back to the organization mission. Agents know what to do and why.

💓 Heartbeats

Agents wake on a schedule, check work, and act. Delegation flows up and down the org chart.

💰 Cost Control

Monthly budgets per agent. When they hit the limit, they stop. No runaway costs.

🏢 Multi-Organization

One deployment, many organizations. Complete data isolation. One control plane for your portfolio.

🎫 Ticket System

Every conversation traced. Every decision explained. Full tool-call tracing and immutable audit log.

🛡️ Governance

Approve hires, override strategy, pause or terminate any agent — at any time.

📊 Org Chart

Hierarchies, roles, reporting lines. Your agents have a boss, a title, and a job description.

📱 Mobile Ready

Monitor and manage your autonomous businesses from anywhere.

Problems Paperclip solves

Without Paperclip With Paperclip
❌ 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. Manageme

readme truncated — read the full docs on github

Frequently asked questions

Is Paperclip free to use?

Paperclip is open source under the MIT licence. There is no licence fee and no seat count — you can self-host it or, where the project offers one, pay a vendor for a managed version instead.

What does Paperclip do?

Org chart, budgets, and governance for AI agent teams

What is Paperclip written in?

Paperclip is primarily written in TypeScript. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/paperclipai/paperclip, and it has 80,932 GitHub stars.