Open Duet: review, pricing, security and alternatives

What Open Duet does

Open Duet belongs to the personal assistants family: general-purpose agents, often self-hosted and driven from a messaging app, that act for you on your files, accounts and services. On our grid it ranks #31 of the 46 projects of this family listed in the directory.

Who is Open Duet for?

It targets individuals and freelancers who want an assistant able to act for them day to day, often from a messaging app. Typical tasks people give it:

• sort e-mail and draft replies
• manage a calendar and reminders
• look up information and summarise it
• run small recurring tasks

It is a good candidate if your data must stay on your machines.

Access and human control

According to its documentation, Open Duet can:

• control the screen, keyboard and mouse

By default it asks for your confirmation before sensitive actions (command, send, delete). Keep that setting, at least at first: full-auto mode saves time but removes the last safeguard.

Open Duet pricing

The code is free, under the Apache-2.0 licence.

Getting started with Open Duet

1. Install it: the project ships as a Python package (install with pip or uv). The exact command is in the repository README.
2. Create an API key with the model provider and put it in an environment variable, never in a shared or versioned file.
3. Give it a first playground with nothing at stake: a test folder, a secondary account or a throwaway project. Only open your real accounts once you have seen how it behaves.
4. Give it a short, checkable task, review the result and its action log, then raise the difficulty step by step.

Security: risk level

A personal assistant often combines access to private data, reading outside content and sending messages: the combination that enables data leaks through prompt injection.

Points found for Open Duet:

• Supervised sensitive access: it can act on the system, but asks for confirmation by default.

Three habits: least privilege (minimal rights, dedicated keys), human approval for irreversible actions, a sandbox for code execution. The AI agent security check reviews your setup in a few minutes.

Project activity and releases

Created on May 25, 2023, the Anil-matcha/open-duet repository has 6,140 stars, 762 forks and 1 open issues, with 291 commits in total. It received changes this month.

Over the last 52 weeks: 277 commits, an average of 5.3 per week.

The project publishes no numbered releases on GitHub: you install it from the main branch or a package manager.

Open Duet vs other personal assistants

GitHub stars of the best-rated open-source projects in the personal assistants family. Stars measure attention, not quality: a heavily promoted project collects them fast, a specialised tool will have few.

Open Duet and other personal assistants at a glance

The 7 best-ranked agents in the same family, 7 of them open source. The score out of 100 only applies to open-source projects; for proprietary services we show the published entry price. A dash marks information the documentation does not state.

How we rated it

Score: 59/100, computed only from public, verifiable data, with no subjective testing or partnership:

• Adoption 21/40: 6,140 stars on a log scale (40 points from about 200,000).
• Activity 18/30: last commit less than a month ago, 0 releases in six months, 277 commits in a year.
• Framework 20/30: licence, default human approval, self-hosting, model choice and documentation site.

The score does not say whether the agent will succeed at your tasks: it measures how solid the project is. The full grid is on the method page.