Octop is a self-hosted AI assistant open-sourced by Tencent Cloud, positioned as a multi-user, multi-agent platform for families and small teams. Through a single process, it simultaneously provides a web dashboard, CLI, desktop app, scheduled tasks, and access to multiple IM channels, with all conversations, workspaces, and credentials stored on the user's own machine.
In terms of use cases, Octop can be used for personal assistants (writing weekly reports, organizing notes, managing schedules), family sharing (one admin account for the whole family, assigning different agents and experts to members), team collaboration (routing tasks to group chats such as Feishu, DingTalk, WeCom, and WeChat through AgentTeams or parallel agents), developer assistance (delegating coding tasks to external coding agents such as OpenCode and Claude Code via ACP, or getting AI assistance in the terminal), web automation (using Browser AI+ and remote desktop to handle forms, screenshots, and GUI applications), and scheduled tasks (configuring cron in natural language so agents can push or execute tasks on time).
Main capabilities include: a multi-agent architecture, where each user has their own team of experts and can switch by task; support for the web dashboard, CLI, desktop clients (Windows/macOS/Linux, plus an FnOS NAS package), and HTTP/SSE/WebSocket APIs; access to IM channels such as Feishu, DingTalk, QQ, WeChat, WeCom, Telegram, and Discord; 16 MBTI persona templates and custom system prompts; an expert library scanned at startup, supporting an expert marketplace and in-deployment sharing; AgentTeams (Beta), which can handle multi-step tasks through a coordinator and member experts; a knowledge base supporting document-based RAG retrieval and selective sharing within the same deployment; a plugin system supporting the installation and management of third-party plugins; MCP connectors including Tencent Docs, Tencent Meeting, Notion, TickTick, OpenAlex, Feishu CLI, WeCom CLI, Agent Mail, Obsidian, WeKnora, Dify, and more; and ACP supporting bidirectional integration, both as an ACP server for external tools and for delegating to external coding agents such as OpenCode, CodeBuddy, Claude Code, and Codex.
In terms of usage, macOS/Linux can use a one-line installation script, while Windows provides PowerShell or cmd installation methods; the installation script uses uv to create an isolated Python 3.12 environment under ~/.octop/, without relying on the system Python. It can also be installed from PyPI or built from source with uv. Docker deployment is recommended for production environments. After installation, run the octop init interactive wizard to create the SQLite database, JWT secret key, and the first admin account, then access http://127.0.0.1:8088 to use the web dashboard. The desktop app can be downloaded directly from GitHub Releases as the installation package for the corresponding platform.
Limitations and notes: the product is in a phase of continuous evolution; roadmap items such as a shared resource pool, expert sharing, PC client, AgentTeams, mobile client, browser and terminal optimization, self-evolution, managed agents, project spaces, cloud-edge collaboration, plugin marketplace, and conversational control plane are medium- to long-term plans and may be adjusted as the community develops. API documentation is disabled by default, and enable_api_docs must be set to true in config.json. The password policy requires at least 8 characters and must include letters and numbers. External IM maintenance functionality requires verified sender permissions and is not yet enabled. Specific commercial information such as fees and pricing is not currently provided in the materials.
