Sistava vs Paperclip
AI Workforces
Sistava vs Paperclip
Paperclip is an open-source, self-hosted platform for managing AI agents as if they were employees. It gives you an org chart, per-agent budgets, goal alignment, a ticket-style audit trail, and board-level approval gates on top of agents you bring yourself (Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Cursor, or any runtime). The reframing is sharp: you are not using an AI tool, you are managing a team.,The key distinction: Paperclip is the governance and coordination layer, not the workforce. You still build or connect each agent, supply your own model keys, and host the whole stack. Sistava ships the employees themselves, fully managed, so a non-technical founder hires a pre-built team and it starts working in minutes without any infrastructure to run.
Profile
- Pricing
- Free, open-source (MIT), self-hosted. You pay your own LLM and infrastructure costs.
- Founded
- 2025
- Funding
- Open-source project
- Focus
- Open-source, self-hosted layer to manage AI agents as employees (org chart, budgets, governance)
Why Sistava
- Paperclip manages agents you bring and host. Sistava ships the agents. You hire a pre-built employee from a marketplace and it works immediately, no agent to build or runtime to wire.
- Paperclip is self-hosted: you run the stack, patch it, and supply your own LLM keys. Sistava is fully managed. Hosting, LLM credits, integrations, and support are included, and setup takes about two minutes with no terminal.
- Sistava includes execution surfaces Paperclip leaves to whatever agent you connect: browser and desktop automation, live voice, and Slack, email, and mailbox channels.
- Sistava layers short-term, long-term, episodic, and graph memory across the whole workforce. In Paperclip, memory depends entirely on the runtime you wire underneath it.
- Both model the org chart, heartbeat scheduling, budgets, and approval gates. In Sistava those are built into a managed product with credit-based billing. In Paperclip you operate the infrastructure that makes them run.
- Paperclip targets builders comfortable self-hosting. Sistava is built so a non-technical founder runs an AI workforce by chatting with it.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Paperclip | Sistava |
|---|---|---|
| ✓ | ✓ | |
| ✗ | ✓ | |
| ✗ | ✓ | |
| Bring your own keys | ✓ | |
| ✓ | ✓ | |
| ✓ | Credits and quotas | |
| Board-level approval | Approval gates and guardrails | |
| Ticket system | Activity feed and execution inspection | |
| ✓ | ✓ | |
| ✓ | Automatic model routing | |
| ✗ | ✓ | |
| ✗ | ✓ | |
| ✗ | ✓ | |
| Depends on runtime | Graph + episodic | |
| ✗ | ✓ | |
| ✓ | ✗ | |
| Free (self-hosted) + your LLM and infra costs | Free + $49/mo |