OpenClaw Features: Channels, Routing, Media, and UX

Highlights

• Channels, One Gateway covers Discord, iMessage, Signal, Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, WebChat, and additional platforms.

• Plugins, A single install command brings in official plugins for Matrix, Nextcloud Talk, Nostr, Twitch, Zalo, and many more.

• Routing, Isolated sessions enable multi-agent routing.

• Media, Handles images, audio, video, documents, plus image and video generation.

• Apps and UI, Includes Windows Hub, browser Control UI, a macOS menu bar app, and mobile nodes.

• Mobile nodes, iOS and Android nodes offer pairing, voice and chat, plus extensive device commands.

Full list

Channels:

• The core installation ships with Telegram and WebChat; all other channels come as official plugins via openclaw plugins install @openclaw/<id> (or on demand during openclaw onboard / openclaw channels add)
• Official plugin channels: Discord, Feishu, Google Chat, iMessage, IRC, LINE, Matrix, Mattermost, Microsoft Teams, Nextcloud Talk, Nostr, QQ Bot, Raft, Signal, Slack, SMS, Synology Chat, Tlon, Twitch, Voice Call, WhatsApp, Zalo, and Zalo Personal
• Channels maintained outside the OpenClaw repo as external plugins: WeChat, Yuanbao, and Zalo ClawBot
• Group chat works with mention-based activation
• DM safety relies on allowlists and pairing

Agent:

• Embedded agent runtime streams tool output
• Multi-agent routing keeps sessions isolated per workspace or sender
• Sessions: direct chats merge into a shared main; groups stay isolated by default
• Long responses use streaming and chunking

Auth and providers:

• Over 35 model providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and others)
• OAuth handles subscription auth (for example, OpenAI Codex)
• Custom and self-hosted providers are supported (vLLM, SGLang, Ollama, llama.cpp, LM Studio, and any OpenAI-compatible or Anthropic-compatible endpoint)

Media:

• Images, audio, video, and documents move in and out
• Audio and video play inline in the Control UI, iOS/macOS, Android, and the Linux companion
• Shared surfaces expose image generation and video generation capabilities
• Voice notes get transcribed
• Text-to-speech works with multiple providers

Apps and interfaces:

• WebChat plus browser Control UI
• macOS menu bar companion app
• iOS node with pairing, camera, screen recording, location, and voice
• Android node with pairing, chat, voice, camera, and device commands

Tools and automation:

• Browser automation, exec, sandboxing
• Web search (Brave, DuckDuckGo, Exa, Firecrawl, Gemini, Grok, Kimi, MiniMax Search, Ollama Web Search, Perplexity, SearXNG, Tavily)
• Cron jobs and heartbeat scheduling
• Skills, plugins, and workflow pipelines (Lobster)

Related

• Experimental features, Opt-in capabilities not yet on the default surface.

• Agent runtime, How the agent runtime model dispatches runs.

• Channels, Link Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, and more through one Gateway.

• Plugins, Official and external plugins that extend OpenClaw.