OpenClaw is the Telnet of today. Using it is a terrible idea. Kilo is celebrating rapid migration of OpenClaw users to Hermes. 50% already have made a switch.

~35% stick with OpenClaw despite its flaws, citing unmatched integrations and the largest skill ecosystem

~30% have switched to Hermes, praising easier setup and better memory defaults

~20% use both tools together, running OpenClaw as the orchestrator and Hermes as an execution specialist

To be fair, that’s a 30% abandonment rate given 20% still are in transition. Kilo explains that the competition is architectural.

Feature checklists make these tools look nearly identical. The real divergence is architectural, and it shapes everything downstream.

Here’s the buried lede. It’s the vibe coded bugs of low quality.

“Every single update ships more bugs and more problems than before… there’s a difference between ‘beta’ and ‘this literally cannot handle real use cases.’

“Every new update has a ~25% chance of breaking response delivery for heartbeat messages, cron jobs, and web hooks.”

“I went 7 days without being able to use OpenClaw with my provider because it flat out broke the integration.”

Security is barely mentioned, despite OpenClaw clearly being the worst software ever made in history.

I’ve never seen so many CVEs, ever. What the comments above reflect is that OpenClaw gets worse when it tries to close the hundreds of flaws that it just introduced. Apparently software engineers can release something that isn’t even engineered. OpenClaw was developed like a kid with a butter knife called himself a brain surgeon.

Cost is another surprise factor, although it is an external risk shared by both.

The root cause is well understood: every message sends the full conversation history to the API, so costs compound within a session. Users who don’t aggressively manage conversation resets see costs spiral.

The community’s solution is a shift toward flat-rate subscriptions and cheaper models. MiniMax at $10-20/month, Ollama Pro Cloud at $20/month, and free models like Qwen 3.5 via OpenRouter are rapidly replacing per-token API billing as the default.

…Anthropic’s account bans are pushing users away. Multiple users report being banned despite spending thousands on the API.