OpenClaw Mission Control Dashboard: Which One to Use (2026)

What people call OpenClaw Mission Control

OpenClaw is open-source software that runs AI agents on a machine you control. The program doing that is called the gateway. It stays on in the background, runs your agents and connects them to Telegram, WhatsApp or Slack. The gateway also serves a web page called the Control UI, which you open in a browser.

Until OpenClaw 2.0, released on 31 August 2026, that page was mostly settings and a chat box. Patrick Erichsen, an OpenClaw developer who co-hosts the project's podcast, the ClawCast, described the old page as a place to "dig into the weeds of configuration" (9 September 2026).

A settings page couldn't show the work, so people built their own dashboards. The first three GitHub projects called Mission Control appeared between 30 January and 1 February 2026.

Alex Finn, a YouTuber who teaches people to code with AI, made the name a trend with a video on 2 March. The video showed a dashboard Alex Finn's agent had built for itself, and told viewers to ask theirs for one: "Please build it in Next.js and host it on the local host." Next.js is a kit for building web apps, and "local host" means the app stays on your own machine.

That agent checks a task board "in every heartbeat", OpenClaw's regular scheduled wake-up, and does whatever is assigned to it. US searches for the term peaked that month, at 5,400 (Google Ads). Google's results still mix three things: an app your agent builds, an add-on you install and a paid service.

Here are the screens people copy, and what OpenClaw ships for each. The table describes OpenClaw 2026.10.10, the newest stable version on 4 November, released the day before. OpenClaw's version numbers start with a year and a month, but they aren't release dates.

Sources: OpenClaw's Control UI feature reference, Workboard and Session Dashboards pages, read on 4 November 2026; Alex Finn's video of 2 March 2026; the add-ons' READMEs, a README being a project's instructions page.

So for one gateway, most of a Mission Control now exists inside OpenClaw. Only two pieces need switching on or asking for: the board and the dashboards.

Which Mission Control for OpenClaw should you use?

Start with the built-in version unless one of the cases below fits you.

The board was tested on 4 November. Session dashboards weren't, because they need a real AI model to write each widget.

Do you need a board at all?

How much runs without you decides it. Work you start and watch yourself needs no board, because the chat already shows it. A few agents that report to you in chat can do without one too. Many agents with many scheduled jobs are hard to follow from a chat window.

Dan Malone, a software developer, built a Kanban dashboard (cards moving across columns) in early 2026 and dropped it. Malone asked: "What does a dashboard give me that I don't already get from running Claude Code locally? For my setup, not much." What was missing was reaching the agents from a phone and having them work overnight. Malone gave each of four agents its own topic in a Telegram group, on OpenClaw, and got both.

Ritz, a member of OpenClaw's community team, built a dashboard before the built-in pieces existed. Ritz's agents then wrote themselves a way to reach it. Ritz's verdict: "this is overwhelming. So I stopped using it. My agents kept using it but I stopped using it" (ClawCast, 9 September 2026).

I don't keep a task board as such either. I have a triage job that deals with incoming tasks: it keeps running, and it resolves each task as it arrives or at a set hour. That is the same principle as a board. To talk to my agents I used private Discord servers, and I've kept them: the app is on my phone, nobody else is in there, and it works well.

Jonathan Tsai, a software engineer, is at the other end, with many agents and many schedules. Tsai runs 5 separate OpenClaw gateways, with 10 helper agents and "20+ scheduled tasks per instance", an instance being one gateway. Tsai built OpenClaw Command Center in February 2026 to follow them. The work still happens in Slack, because "humans are already in Slack". The dashboard adds "the bird's-eye view you're missing".

A board also needs a machine that stays on. Agents work only while the gateway's machine is on, so a board on a laptop you close shows nothing moving. And if your board would only ever hold one recurring job, an OpenClaw alternative made for that job may do it with less to watch.

Turn on OpenClaw's own task board: the Workboard

The board is the first thing to switch on if the built-in route fits you. The Workboard is a Kanban board: cards that move across columns as work progresses. It is a plugin, an optional module that comes with OpenClaw, so unlike an add-on it has nothing to install. It first shipped in version 2026.5.28 on 30 May 2026, and it was still off by default on 2026.10.10.

Run these two lines in a terminal, the text window where you type commands, on the machine where OpenClaw runs:

openclaw plugins enable workboard
openclaw dashboard

The first line switches the board on while the gateway keeps running: a test on 4 November needed no restart. Your agent can run that line for you, or you can use the Control UI: open Plugins, then Workboard, then the on/off switch under Lifecycle.

The second line opens the Control UI in your browser, with a sign-in link that works once, for ten minutes. That link gives the browser administrator access, so don't share it. A Workboard tab then appears in the left-hand menu. Despite its name, openclaw dashboard only opens this page.

The page's address is http://127.0.0.1:18789/. 127.0.0.1 means this machine, and 18789 is the port, a numbered door on the machine where one program answers.

If OpenClaw runs on a rented server, those lines open nothing on your laptop. Connect in three steps, or ask your agent to walk you through them:

1. Open a tunnel from your laptop. A tunnel is an encrypted link to the server over SSH, your remote login: ssh -N -L 18789:127.0.0.1:18789 user@your-server, with your own login and server address.
2. Get a sign-in link on the server. Run openclaw dashboard --json, and copy the link it calls browserUrl.
3. Paste that link into your laptop's browser. It works once, for ten minutes.

A card is one task for an agent, with a title, notes, a priority and, if you like, a named agent. You create one in the Workboard tab, or by typing /workboard create and a title in a chat with your agent. These statuses matter most: ready (waiting to be picked up), running, review (waiting for you to look), blocked (failed or stuck) and done.

A card starts in one of three ways, and each one is something you trigger:

• Run Claude and Run OpenAI are buttons on the card. You click, and the card goes straight to that AI model. OpenClaw's docs say they use Claude Sonnet 4.6 and GPT-6 Astra.
• Open Claude and Open OpenAI are buttons too. They open a chat tied to the card and send nothing, so you type the instructions yourself.
• Dispatch is a command that hands cards marked ready to your agents. You run openclaw workboard dispatch, type /workboard dispatch in a chat, or use the dispatch action in the Control UI. Each time, it starts at most three workers, one per agent. A worker is a temporary run of an agent on one card.

What happened when cards were run

A board is only useful if cards actually finish, so the Run and dispatch routes were tested on 4 November 2026. OpenClaw 2026.10.10 ran in a throwaway container, a sealed-off copy of a computer deleted afterwards. A stand-in program answered in place of an AI model, so nothing was billed and no real work was done. It was set up to report back to the board the way a model is told to.

• The Run route worked with no extra setup. With the board switched on, the test made the same call as the Control UI's Run buttons. The card went from todo to running to done within seconds, with the worker's report of what it did attached. OpenClaw calls that report proof.
• Plain dispatch refused the card. The message read: "target agent is not sandboxed for this restricted Workboard card." That doesn't mean your card is sensitive. It means dispatch lets a worker change files in only one folder, the agent's workspace. So OpenClaw wants the worker locked in a sandbox, a sealed-off Docker container that enforces this limit. A default install has no sandbox.
• Dispatch with --admin started the worker at once. Running openclaw workboard dispatch --admin asks for administrator rights, so the worker is no longer limited to that folder.
• A worker that stopped with an empty answer left the card blocked. OpenClaw retried once, counted the run as failed and marked the card blocked after about four seconds. That agent then took no new card until the blocked one was moved to done, which you do yourself, even though it failed.
• A worker that answered but never reported finishing sent the card to review. Workers are told to call a tool named workboard_complete when they finish. Without that report, the card waits for you to look.

--admin can be fine at home. It opens nothing new if only you write cards and your agent reads no outside text. It gives the worker the access your agent already has in any chat on a default install, and the Run buttons do the same.

Use the sandbox if cards can come from other people or other agents. Use it too if your agent works on text you don't control, such as emails, because that text can carry instructions aimed at your agent. The comparison of Hermes and OpenClaw, Hermes being another open-source agent, explains that risk.

Let dispatch run cards in a sandbox

To run dispatch without --admin, you need Docker, one image and four settings. Docker is a program that runs sealed-off containers, and an image is the template each container starts from. Install Docker first, or ask your agent to.

These settings change more than cards. Your main conversation, the direct chat with your agent, stays as it is. Group chats, channels and workers move into containers. There they can read and change only the agent's workspace folder, and by default they lose the browser, scheduled jobs and the tools that act on chat apps.

Paste these lines in a terminal, or ask your agent to run them:

# 1. Build the sandbox image (OpenClaw's docs give the recipe; 11 seconds, 238 MB in the test)
docker build -t openclaw-sandbox:bookworm-slim - <<'DOCKERFILE'
FROM debian:bookworm-slim
ENV DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
  bash ca-certificates curl git jq python3 ripgrep \
  && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*
RUN useradd --create-home --shell /bin/bash sandbox
USER sandbox
WORKDIR /home/sandbox
CMD ["sleep", "infinity"]
DOCKERFILE
# 2. Sandbox every conversation except your main one, one container per conversation, with write access to the workspace
openclaw config set agents.defaults.sandbox.mode non-main
openclaw config set agents.defaults.sandbox.scope session
openclaw config set agents.defaults.sandbox.workspaceAccess rw
# 3. Let workers inside the sandbox report back to the board
openclaw config set tools.sandbox.tools.alsoAllow '["workboard_heartbeat","workboard_complete","workboard_block"]'

In the test, each setting applied without a restart, and dispatch then finished the card in its own container. If dispatch still refuses, its message names the missing piece:

• "target sandbox is not exclusive to this worker session" means the scope setting is missing.
• "target tool policy blocks required tool workboard_heartbeat" means the last setting is missing.
• "Sandbox image not found" means the image isn't built, or has another name.

If dispatch asks for another image name, build that one. OpenClaw's images page uses openclaw-sandbox:trixie-slim, while OpenClaw 2026.10.10 asked for openclaw-sandbox:bookworm-slim. Trixie and bookworm are versions of Debian, the Linux system inside the container. Change the name on both the docker build line and the FROM line.

Let cards start while you're away

Nothing starts a ready card by itself, so something has to run dispatch while you're away. That something is an automation, OpenClaw's name for a scheduled job. This line creates one that runs dispatch every 15 minutes, which is what */15 * * * * means:

openclaw automations create "*/15 * * * *" --name "Workboard dispatch" --command "openclaw workboard dispatch --admin"

In the test on 4 November, that job started a worker and the card reached done. The job itself makes no call to the AI model: only the cards it starts do. Drop --admin from the line once the sandbox is set up. With neither one, the card stayed in ready.

What a card costs

You pay for what each call to the AI model sends, counted in tokens, about four characters each. A call sends your agent's standing instructions, the description of its tools and the conversation so far. Each kind of call starts at a different size, so the test measured each one:

Source: requests measured on a fresh install of OpenClaw 2026.10.10, 4 November 2026; characters divided by four, OpenClaw's own rule of thumb. Skills and plugins you add make these bigger.

A worker gets shorter standing instructions than a chat, and a sandboxed worker shorter still. Each card in the test took two calls, and the second resent everything in the first. Together they sent about 20,400 tokens without a sandbox and 14,700 with one.

Run Claude uses Claude Sonnet 4.6, and Anthropic's price list charged $3 per million tokens sent on 4 November 2026. So 20,400 tokens cost 6 cents, plus a little for the model's reply: about 7 cents a card without a sandbox and 5 cents with one. A real task takes more calls, and each call resends everything before it.

Anthropic's cache lowers that a little. The cache is a short-lived store for the fixed part of a call, and OpenClaw uses it by default with Anthropic's models. Storing costs more than the normal price: $3.75 per million tokens on this model. Reading it back within five minutes costs far less: $0.30 per million. So calls seconds apart, like a card's, cost slightly less than those figures.

What the board tracks for you

Once a card is linked to a conversation, the board follows it. An active conversation puts the card in running, a finished one in review and a failed one in blocked. A worker's own report of finishing puts it in done. Moving a card to review, blocked or done yourself stops that automatic sync.

The board also flags trouble. It marks an assigned card left untouched for an hour, a running card silent for 20 minutes, two failures on one card, and a card marked done with no proof attached. That proof is the worker's own word, and the docs warn it is "not independent verification".

A second kind of board, the Sessions board, sorts your existing conversations into columns such as Needs input, Stuck and Working. It creates no cards.

Know the Workboard's limits before a daily routine depends on it. The docs call it "intentionally small": it "tracks local operating work for one OpenClaw Gateway" and "is not a replacement for GitHub Issues, Linear, Jira", three services teams use to track projects.

OpenClaw's developers call it young. On the ClawCast of 19 August 2026, Erichsen said "some things are super experimental" because Peter Steinberger, OpenClaw's creator, "shipped workboard a little while ago". It stays the pick because it costs nothing to try and adds no outside program. Use it for your own work on one gateway, and keep a team's projects elsewhere.

Ask your agent for an OpenClaw Mission Control dashboard

The board tracks work. The other half of Alex Finn's idea, a screen your agent builds for you, is now part of OpenClaw too. Since OpenClaw 2.0 (version 2026.8.1), each conversation in the Control UI can own what OpenClaw calls a session dashboard: a grid of small widgets your agent writes when you ask. A session is OpenClaw's word for a conversation. Type /dashboard in a new conversation and say what you want to see.

What you type is most of the work. Here is what four people asked for:

• A school-emails dashboard came from Hannes Rudolph, OpenClaw's community manager, live on GitHub's Open Source Friday show (23 October 2026). The request: "create a dashboard that refreshes daily with my school activities based on emails coming". The result listed a $4 soda-shop pre-order due that day, news to Rudolph: "I don't even know what that is."
• A server health card came from ByteGrad, a web-development teacher, who asked to "create and pin a native dashboard widget named VPS health to this conversation" (7 September 2026). A VPS is a rented server. "Native" tells your agent you don't want a separate web app.
• A list of new AI agent releases came from Creator Magic, a YouTube channel on AI, which then told OpenClaw to "create me an automation that runs every day at 6:00 in the morning" to update it (4 September 2026). An automation is OpenClaw's name for a scheduled job.
• A newspaper of the team's own work came from Vincent Koc, OpenClaw's chief architect. Koc showed the podcast The Neuron a dashboard that goes through the project's code changes and "builds like a newspaper for us every day" (21 September 2026).

Peter Steinberger gave the simplest route on the ClawCast of 2 September 2026. Ask your agent to visualize something in the chat, then "if you like that you want to make it more permanent ask them to like put it on the dashboard". OpenClaw's own two-minute demo shows one built from one prompt.

Each widget runs sealed off inside the page and never holds your master key. Your agent can also pin a report (text, figures, a table or a chart) or the Workboard itself. Who updates a widget decides whether it costs money:

• An update by your agent costs one model call each time. That covers an ordinary scheduled job and your own request, and anything that needs reading or summarising, such as those school emails. "You will always need an LLM", the ClawCast hosts said on 9 September, an LLM being the AI model.
• An update by the widget itself costs no model call. A widget can list a web address it wants to read. Once you approve that address, it fetches the data itself: the docs' example is "a weather card that refreshes itself from an API". It can also read OpenClaw's own figures, such as usage. A scheduled job that only runs a command or a script involves no AI model either.

Here is what your agent's updates cost. A scheduled job's call starts at about 12,200 tokens, measured on OpenClaw 2026.10.10 on 4 November. Refreshes 10 minutes apart miss the cache, because its five minutes have run out, so each one pays the storing price. On Claude Sonnet 4.6, that is 12,200 × $3.75 ÷ 1,000,000, about 4.6 cents a refresh.

A refresh every 10 minutes makes 6 × 24 × 30 = 4,320 refreshes a month, so roughly $200 a month on Claude Sonnet 4.6. Claude Haiku 5.5 charges $0.125 per million tokens to store, and it counts about 30% more tokens for the same text, which makes about $9 a month.

A daily refresh, like the examples above, comes to 30 × 4.6 cents, about $1.40 a month on Sonnet. Reading emails and writing the reply add to each figure, and each scheduled job can name its own, cheaper model.

One catch for older conversations: they keep their old set of tools. "You need to create a new session to create a dashboard", Ritz said on the ClawCast of 9 September.

Building a separate dashboard app from a prompt

A separate app, the original Mission Control, still has its place if the dashboard is itself a product you're building for other people. It costs more than the videos showing it suggest, and the first screen is the easy part.

• The quick start comes with fake data. Phil Lougher, a YouTuber, got a first version in seven minutes from a prompt and a screenshot (12 May 2026). It arrived full of dummy data, and the next step was to tell the agent "Remove the dummy data, wire up my agents". Jacob Klug, who runs an agency building on Lovable, an AI app builder, rebuilt one there and said the same: "Obviously, all this is dummy data" (23 February 2026).
• The model calls add up. ByteGrad "spent something like 20 or 30 dollars in like no time" on OpenAI's pay-per-use models, building a simple one over Telegram (3 April 2026).
• Your agent may open it to the world. ByteGrad's agent first served the app on the server's public address, open to anyone, and had to be told to keep it on the machine itself. If you paste keys into the chat to connect the app, they "may show up in logs or session transcripts", ByteGrad's video adds.
• Keeping it running is now your job. Tech with Sas, a YouTube channel, built a board for 14 agents with Claude Code "in few hours" (22 October 2026). Its maker still calls it a "POC MVP type of environment not production", meaning a test version, not something to rely on. Erichsen said it on the ClawCast: "now you're hosting this thing. You have to teach your agents where this thing lives and how to update it".

Third-party Mission Control: OpenClaw add-ons, checked on 4 November 2026

If one of those cases fits you, here is where the add-ons stand. Most of them started in January or February 2026, and most haven't kept pace with OpenClaw.

Source: GitHub repository data and READMEs, read on 4 November 2026. "Last change" is the newest change to the project's main code. "Active" means a change in the 30 days before that date. A star is a GitHub user's bookmark, so it counts interest, not upkeep. "Alpha" is a maker's label for an early, unfinished version.

Three add-ons were tried with OpenClaw 2026.10.10 in the same test as the board, in throwaway containers with fake passwords and the stand-in for the AI model. So they started and answered, but no real agent did real work on them.

builderz-labs: built for agents outside OpenClaw

Of the add-ons, the one from Builderz Labs does the most. Builderz Labs is the software studio that publishes it. It runs as its own web app, at port 3000, and keeps its own list of tasks. A review step called Aegis stops a task reaching done until someone approves it. It also has schedules, alerts, logs, cost views and a memory browser.

Its strength is that it doesn't depend on OpenClaw. A workflow written with CrewAI or LangGraph, two kits for building agents in code, can report to the same board. So can a script on another server or a Claude Code session, including through an MCP server, a standard way to plug tools into AI assistants.

Its README is frank about the opposite case. A CLI is a program you drive by typing commands, and the README says the add-on is "probably the wrong tool" when "one agent on one machine already stays understandable from its native CLI".

It couldn't connect to OpenClaw in the test. Programs connect to OpenClaw under a numbered set of rules, and OpenClaw has accepted only version 4 since mid-2026. The add-on's latest version, dated 28 October, still uses version 3. The gateway answered "protocol mismatch", meaning the two don't speak the same version. The add-on's own health check said "online" all the same, because it only checks that the web address answers.

Two open bug reports describe that failure, the first filed on 1 September. A maintainer confirmed the cause on 26 October, and on 4 November the code still said version 3. Until the fix ships, it can't show or direct your OpenClaw agents. Its README says the parts that need no gateway, such as its own tasks, schedules and cost views, run without one.

It holds OpenClaw's master key and can hand it on. It asks the gateway for the administrator level of access, which allows everything. When the test asked the add-on's connect address for the key, it answered with the master key, in readable text. Its code gives the key to operator and administrator accounts on the add-on, not to viewer accounts. OpenClaw's docs treat that key as "trusted operator access for that Gateway".

robsannaa: a control panel for one machine

Robsannaa's Mission Control is lighter. It keeps almost no data of its own and runs on the gateway's machine at http://localhost:3333, localhost meaning this machine. It drives OpenClaw through OpenClaw's own command-line program, so setup never asks you for the key.

It still holds the master key. Running under your user account, it can read OpenClaw's settings file, and it takes the key from there by itself. Its chat panel sends that key to the gateway, and the command-line program it drives has the same full rights.

With 2026.10.10, every screen tried came back with data: gateway status, agents, scheduled jobs, usage and conversations. Its task board is its own, though: cards created on OpenClaw's Workboard didn't appear on it. The test turned up three other things:

• It changed OpenClaw's settings without asking. Its first health check switched on gateway.http.endpoints.responses.enabled, a setting that gives the gateway a new web address for starting agent runs. That address refused a request without the master key, so it is one more way in for whoever holds the key, not for strangers. Its code says the chat panel needs it. Switched off, the setting stayed off until the add-on restarted, and its next health check then turned it back on.
• Installed as its README says, it makes every OpenClaw backup bigger. The README puts it inside ~/.openclaw, OpenClaw's own data folder, where it takes 1.4 GB. OpenClaw backs up that whole folder. The compressed backup grew from 0.4 MB to 306 MB, and it took 44 seconds instead of 1. The add-on finds that folder on its own, per its README, so install it somewhere else.
• It has no login by default. It answers only on the machine itself, at port 3333, and its panels include a terminal on that machine. Before anyone else can reach it, ask your agent to turn its login on: MISSION_CONTROL_AUTH=token, with a password in MISSION_CONTROL_AUTH_TOKEN, in the add-on's settings.

In March, its setup wizard also replaced the default model in OpenClaw's settings file without asking, a bug fixed since.

OpenClaw Command Center: a view with no task board

Jonathan Tsai's add-on shows conversations, token counts, costs and machine health. It is small, about 8 MB, with nothing to build. You run one copy per gateway, each on its own port. With 2026.10.10, it started and listed conversations, token counts and machine health, and it changed no OpenClaw setting.

Its README calls it read-only by default, and the restart and clean-up actions in its code only print the command for you to run. Its code doesn't take the master key, but it drives OpenClaw's command-line program, which has the same full rights on that machine.

It answers from outside the machine by default. Its README says it binds to the machine only. With default settings in the test, it answered on the machine's network address with no login. Turn its login on before you start it: DASHBOARD_AUTH_MODE=token, with a password in DASHBOARD_TOKEN. With those set, a request without the password was refused.

The others, not installed

These weren't tested. What follows comes from their own pages and from Google's US results on 4 November 2026.

• abhi1693/openclaw-mission-control is the first result on Google for this search, and two other pages in Google's top results still give its install command. Its owner archived it on 6 August 2026. Its README says "No new features, bug fixes, or security updates will be made" and "New deployments are not recommended".
• Wardn AI is where abhi1693's README sends you. It has 22 GitHub stars and calls itself "a control plane for governed AI tool access", meaning one place to approve the outside tools assistants may use. Its README doesn't mention OpenClaw, so it isn't a new home for an OpenClaw board.
• grp06/openclaw-studio is a plain web dashboard for one gateway, with agents, chat, approvals and scheduled jobs. It starts with one command and asks for your gateway's address and master key. A bug report open since 10 June says it can't connect, the same failure as builderz-labs', with no answer from its maintainer.
• crshdn/mission-control has become Autensa, which calls itself "The World's First Autonomous Product Engine": agents that research a market, then propose features and code changes. It is no longer a dashboard for OpenClaw.
• ClawDeck closed its hosted service on 30 May 2026 and sends users on to another product. You can still host its open-source Kanban board yourself.
• TenacitOS draws your agents in a 3D office and shows costs from OpenClaw's own records. Like robsannaa's, its README installs it inside OpenClaw's folder (in ~/.openclaw/workspace), so OpenClaw's backups carry it too.
• AgentCenter is a paid service and the fourth result on Google. It calls itself a "Mission Control dashboard for your OpenClaw agents", for agents on any machine. Plans started at $14 a month for 5 agents on 4 November 2026, with a 7-day trial, and you bring your own model. Without a test, this page can't say what it holds or how well it works.
• ClawController installs with a script from its site. The site calls it "The official management dashboard for OpenClaw agents", and OpenClaw's docs list no such thing.
• ClawControl is a hosted board whose monthly plans aren't on sale yet. Its site said on 4 November 2026: "Sign-ups are paused while we rebuild ClawControl".

Five checks before you connect any add-on

Whichever add-on you consider, it needs deep access to your gateway to be useful, so these checks matter more than its features. Run them on any add-on, including an app your agent writes:

1. Maintained: when did it last change? Does it work with your OpenClaw version?
2. Key: does it hold your master key?
3. Writes: does it change openclaw.json or turn settings on?
4. Location: where is it installed, and does that folder end up in your backups?
5. Reach: who can open it, and does it have its own login?

Check that it's maintained and compatible. A frozen project gets no fixes, and an active one can still lag behind. OpenClaw's guide for outside apps tells their makers to stick to a version they've tested.

On a project's GitHub page, a banner says when it is archived, the date of its latest change sits above the file list, and its versions are listed under Releases. Search its open bug reports, under Issues, for your OpenClaw version. Then update the add-on or OpenClaw, never both at once.

Updates are where this bites. I had updates break my own setup again and again, and the time went into repairing it instead of the work. Every add-on is one more piece an update can break, so weigh that time against what the add-on gives you.

Check whether it holds your master key. Ask your agent to read the add-on's setup and tell you. Any add-on holding your OpenClaw master key can do whatever you can do on that gateway, so treat it like an admin login.

OpenClaw's operator-scopes page says web access with that key gets "the full default operator scope set", meaning every right a person has. Accept it only if you'd hand its makers your admin password, and keep the key in the add-on's settings file, never in a screenshot or a chat.

Replace the key if you remove the add-on: OpenClaw's network exposure page has the checklist. People or businesses that shouldn't see each other's work need separate gateways. Josh, a member of the OpenClaw team, put it as "one gateway per trust boundary" (ClawCast, 19 August 2026).

Check what it writes. Copy OpenClaw's settings file, openclaw.json, before the first connection, then compare. Run this in a terminal, or ask your agent to:

cp ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json ~/openclaw.json.before-addon
# connect the add-on, open each page once, then:
diff ~/openclaw.json.before-addon ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json

No output means nothing changed. Anything it prints is a changed setting, so ask your agent what that setting does. A write in a format OpenClaw no longer accepts can stop the gateway from starting. Builderz Labs documented exactly that on 1 April 2026, when its add-on kept re-saving a setting OpenClaw had dropped.

Check where it installs. Install add-ons outside ~/.openclaw, so OpenClaw's backups and moves carry only OpenClaw.

Check who can reach it. Each add-on answers at a port of the machine it runs on: 3000 for builderz-labs and OpenClaw Studio, 3333 for robsannaa's. OpenClaw's docs say of the Control UI, at port 18789: "Do not expose it publicly." The same goes for any add-on.

Test it from outside. OpenClaw Dev, a YouTube channel whose tutorial ranks for this search, gave the test in March 2026. Your hosting provider's site shows your server's public address. Type that address and the port in a browser, like http://203.0.113.5:3333. If the add-on opens, "You don't want that, okay? Because then people can get control of your OpenClaw."

To reach an add-on from another computer, use a private route. Your agent can set up either one:

• An SSH tunnel works as for the Control UI, with the add-on's port in place of 18789.
• Tailscale is a private network between your own devices.