Been using both OpenClaw and Claude Cowork for automating workflows and noticed they take fundamentally different approaches to extensibility.
OpenClaw relies on local skills — scripts that run on your machine, read files, control browsers, execute shell commands. Powerful for local automation, but everything runs in your environment and you're limited to what someone has written as a skill.
Claude Cowork supports MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers, which opens up a completely different model. With something like Composio/Rube, Cowork can directly interact with 500+ apps — Slack, GitHub, Google Workspace, Twitter, Notion, CRMs — all through authenticated API connections. No scraping, no brittle browser automation, just native tool calls. It can also chain these together: read a GitHub PR, summarize it in Slack, create a follow-up task in Asana, all in one workflow.
The gap feels significant. OpenClaw gives you a self-hosted Swiss Army knife for local tasks. Claude Cowork with MCP gives you an orchestration layer that talks to your entire SaaS stack natively.
For those using either or both — is the MCP approach as much of a leap forward as it seems? Or does the self-hosted flexibility of OpenClaw still win for certain use cases?
