Tencent open-sources Octop, a self-hosted multi-agent assistant

Octop is an open-source, self-hosted AI assistant platform released by Tencent. It gives you a complete multi-agent environment running locally on your own machine, keeping your chats, knowledge bases, and memories strictly private.

Instead of requiring external message queues or a cluster of microservices, Octop runs everything inside a single process. That single runtime serves a full web dashboard, CLI tools, native desktop clients, and background cron automations.

What you can do with it

Octop treats agents as a team of specialized experts rather than a single chatbot. You can configure multiple specialists for different tasks, assign them system prompts, and even apply 16 MBTI personality templates. With its experimental AgentTeams feature, a dedicated coordinator can break down complex workflows and orchestrate member experts across multiple steps.

Its standout feature is direct messaging integration. Octop bridges natively to WeChat, WeCom, Feishu, DingTalk, QQ, Telegram, and Discord. You and your team can interact with specialized bots right from your regular group chats without opening a separate portal.

Beyond conversation, Octop takes action. It features an interactive browser-based terminal with human-in-the-loop permission gates, remote desktop capabilities, and automated headless Chromium sessions for scraping and form-filling. For developers, it implements the Agent Client Protocol (ACP) both ways: code editors like Zed can use Octop as a backend, while Octop can delegate heavy coding tasks directly to runners like Claude Code or OpenCode.

How to run it

Octop keeps its default control plane in a local SQLite database under your home directory, with optional PostgreSQL support. Agent workspaces can live on local disk, inside Docker sandboxes, or on S3-compatible object stores.

Hardware requirements are minimal. You do not even need Python pre-installed; the official installer uses uv to set up an isolated Python 3.12 environment automatically. A modern multi-core CPU, a few gigabytes of RAM, and sufficient disk space for documents and local embeddings are plenty.

To install it on macOS or Linux, run the official one-line shell installer from TencentCloud's repository. Windows users can run the dedicated PowerShell script. If you prefer graphical interfaces, prebuilt desktop binaries are available for Windows, macOS, and Linux, alongside native packages for FnOS NAS devices. Run octop init to create your admin credentials, then octop run to bring up the dashboard at port 8088.

Why it matters

Octop is an appealing choice for small teams, households, and developers who want powerful multi-agent orchestration without leaking private data to third-party clouds. While many competing agent frameworks require messy orchestrators and microservices, packaging the entire stack into a single restart-safe process with built-in chat bridges makes local deployment remarkably practical.

Keep in mind that advanced multi-agent orchestration via AgentTeams is still in beta, and mobile apps are not fully open yet. We think it is well worth trying right now as a self-hosted team bot for Slack or Discord alternatives, but you should treat automated multi-step task coordination as an evolving experiment rather than a bulletproof production engine.