eliza

elizaOS is a framework for building AI agents that actually do things: answer in your Discord, run a Telegram bot, automate a workflow, or play an NPC in a game. It ships with the parts you'd otherwise wire up yourself, including memory, document ingestion so the agent can read your docs, and connectors for the major chat platforms. MIT licensed, free, and it works with whatever model you want behind it: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Llama, or Grok.

Running it is real work. You need Node 24 and Bun, you bring your own model API key, and you host it yourself. Scaffolding a starter agent takes minutes, but turning that into something reliable in production is a project, not an afternoon.

Solo builders and small teams: this is a strong start if you want control over your agent stack instead of renting someone's hosted bot platform. Larger teams get the same code with no license ceiling. Compare it against LangChain if you want a library rather than a full runtime.

The catch: it moves fast and the surface is wide, so expect breaking changes and rough edges as you go deeper. The framework is free, but your real cost is the LLM tokens every agent burns through, and those add up quietly.