Claude Cowork made a pretty convincing case for letting an AI loose in your folders. All you had to do was give it access and give it a job, and then it went off and did the job, often on a schedule when you’re off doing something else entirely. Anthropic has since merged Cowork into the main Claude app, but the workflow is still there and largely the same — and many of us still call it “Cowork”, to be honest.
The catch is that the whole pipeline runs on Anthropic’s models, which means Anthropic’s usage limits as well. Enter OpenWork, a free, open-source Cowork app built on OpenCode. I pointed it at the same folders that Claude works in, and it really surprised me.
What is OpenWork?
It’s like OpenCode, but built for people who don’t live in a terminal
OpenWork is a free, open-source desktop app for Windows, macOS, and Linux. The site straight up calls it the open-source alternative to Claude Cowork and Codex. It’s built on OpenCode, the open-source coding agent I’ve been spending a lot of time with lately, so there was already a sense of familiarity going in. OpenCode has always leaned toward developers, terminal and all, and OpenWork is basically that same engine with an interface for people who just want to get work done. Anything OpenCode can do works here too.
The folder setup is pretty much the same as any other cowork app. It only touches the folders that you authorize it to read and write, and in desktop mode, your files stay entirely local, with the prompts going straight to whichever model provider you pick. You don’t need an account to get started, though creating a free account unlocks more features.
OpenWork uses the same SKILL.md format as Claude Cowork and Claude Code, so a custom skill you’ve made in Claude will show up in the library without requiring you to import anything. If your setup is bigger, there’s a migration prompt you paste into an agent like Claude Code that moves your plugins and skills over. It even uses OpenCode’s config format for things like custom providers.
The model choice is surprisingly flexible
Claude only runs Claude; this runs anything you want
Because OpenWork is built on OpenCode, it inherits OpenCode’s broad model support. You can point it at any compatible model provider — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, a local model running via Ollama, or anything else OpenCode supports. That means you’re not locked into a single provider’s rate limits or pricing. If you hit a wall with one model, you can switch to another without changing your workflow or folder setup.
This flexibility is what makes OpenWork genuinely useful as a Claude Cowork alternative rather than just a novelty. The skills, the folder access, the scheduling — it all carries over, but now you get to decide which model does the work and how much you’re willing to spend on it.
