I'm only using NanoClaw, but I like that I could (and did) just review the code it has, and that it uses containers for each agent (so I can have different WhatsApp groups working on different things and they can't interfere with each other), and that I could (and did) just swap those containers out easily for guix shell containers.

I am pretty confident that I know how the agent containerization works. In general there's really not a lot of complexity there at all.

If one wants, one can just (ask Claude to) add whatever functionality, or (and that's what I did) just use Claude skills (without adapting NanoClaw any further) and be done with.

What is annoying is that their policy is instead of integrating extra functionality upstream, they prefer you to keep it for yourself. That means I have to either not update from upstream or I am the king of the (useless so far--just rearranging the deck chairs) merge conflicts every single time. So one of the main reasons for contributing to upstream is gone and you keep having to re-integrate stuff into your fork.

I haven't used them all but based on my partial research so far:

- OpenClaw: the big one, but extremely messy codebase and deployment

- NanoClaw: simple, main selling point is that agents spawn their own containers. Personally I don't see why that's preferable to just running the whole thing in a container for single-user purposes

- IronClaw: focused on security (tools run in a WASM sandbox, some defenses against prompt injection but idk if they're any good)

- PicoClaw: targets low-end machines/Raspberry Pis

- ZeroClaw: Claw But In Rust

- NanoBot: ~4k lines of Python, easy to understand and modify. This is the one I landed on and have been using Claude to tweak as needed for myself

The same crap under the hood, IMO.