What is OpenCrane?

OpenCrane is a self-hosted platform for AI agents your organisation actually controls. You run it on your own Kubernetes cluster, so your conversations, documents and credentials never leave infrastructure you operate. Every agent starts with no access at all — you decide exactly what it can see, use and do, and every action it takes is recorded.

Two kinds of agent, and why the difference matters

OpenCrane draws one hard line through everything it does: the line between personal and managed.

• Your personal assistant belongs to you. It only ever uses the tools, files and knowledge you've been granted, it only ever acts as you, and no one else's assistant can read your conversations or your files. → Set up your personal assistant
• A managed agent is a shared worker your organisation configures — think "the agent that triages support tickets" or "the agent that compiles the weekly sales digest." It runs bounded work on a schedule or a trigger, under its own narrow identity, and it never inherits anyone's personal access. → Create a managed agent

Neither kind can quietly become the other. A managed agent can never read your personal conversation, memory or files; it only ever sees what it was explicitly configured to see. Your personal assistant can hand a task to a managed agent, but the managed agent still runs under its own, smaller identity — see Agent delegation.

Why teams choose OpenCrane

• Private by design — your data and every agent run stay on infrastructure you operate.
• Nothing by default — an agent (personal or managed) starts with zero tools, skills, knowledge or model access until you grant it.
• Every run is a record — what ran, under what identity, with what inputs and what it did is kept, not just the final answer.
• Execution is disposable, decisions aren't — the container that ran your request can be thrown away; the record of what it was allowed to do and what happened cannot be quietly changed after the fact.
• One boundary per organisation — your organisation's agents, data and identities are isolated from every other organisation on the same OpenCrane installation.

What you'll do here

1. Install OpenCrane.
2. Set up your organisation's domain.
3. Set up your personal assistant — or create a managed agent for shared, scheduled work.
4. Give it skills, tools and organisational knowledge.
5. Apply access rules and budgets.

TIP

Read How OpenCrane works next for a short tour of what happens every time an agent runs.