OpenComputer vs Shadow: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of OpenComputer and Shadow — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
OpenComputer
Digger
Deploy managed AI agents as persistent, always-on cloud VMs with steerable execution and permanent HTTP endpoints.
Key features
- Persistent VMs: Always-on virtual machines with a full filesystem and OS access that survive restarts, so agent state is exactly where you left it.
- Elastic Compute: Resize memory (1-16 GB) and vCPU while a VM is running to match the workload of the agent harness.
- Instant Checkpoints: Snapshot any VM state to fork or roll back in seconds, recovering from bad agent runs without teardown.
- One-Prompt Deploy: Paste a single prompt into Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor to install the CLI, log in, initialize, and deploy an agent end-to-end.
- Permanent Agent URLs: Every deployed agent gets a stable HTTP endpoint reachable from Slack, webhooks, and cron jobs.
- Steerable Mid-Run: Interrupt and redirect long-running agents without killing the session, keeping durable state intact.
- Hibernate & Wake: Pause idle VMs to stop paying for compute and resume them instantly when the agent is needed again.
Best for
- Shipping B2B Agent Platforms: Provide end users of your Lovable/Devin/Bolt-style product with per-user VMs that remember installed dependencies and files across sessions.
- Long-Running Autonomous Tasks: Run overnight research, scraping, or refactor agents that need to persist context across many hours without a sandbox timeout.
- Slack & Cron-Triggered Agents: Wire a permanent agent URL to a Slack app or cron so a team can invoke the same agent state from anywhere.
- Rapid Agent Prototyping from an IDE: Turn a natural-language prompt inside Claude Code or Cursor into a live, invokable agent without provisioning infrastructure.
- Safe Rollbacks for Autonomous Coders: Use checkpoints to fork an agent VM before risky changes and restore instantly if the agent breaks its environment.
Shadow
Shadow
AI meeting assistant that captures what's said and shown to preserve context and enable flawless follow-ups.
Key features
- Audio and Visual Capture: Records meeting audio and captures what is shown on screen (slides, demos, screen share) to preserve full context for later review.
- Automatic Transcription: Converts spoken meeting content into time-coded text transcripts for reading, searching, and referencing.
- Contextual Summaries & Highlights: Produces concise summaries and highlights key moments to accelerate understanding of meeting outcomes.
- Action Item Extraction: Identifies tasks, decisions, and owners to simplify follow-up and accountability tracking.
- Searchable Meeting Archive: Stores recordings, transcripts, and visual captures in a searchable repository to quickly locate past discussions and resources.
- Sharing and Export: Enables exporting summaries, clips, transcripts, and notes for distribution to stakeholders or integration with collaboration workflows.
- Captures audio from meetings to preserve spoken content
- Captures on-screen and shared visual content shown during meetings
- Creates searchable meeting records combining said and shown information
- Generates meeting summaries and follow-up notes
- Helps teams track decisions and action items from meetings
- Accessible via web presence at shadow.do (platform specifics not listed)
Best for
- Post-meeting follow-up: Generate summaries and action items immediately after meetings to send to attendees and stakeholders.
- Catch-up for absent participants: Provide detailed transcripts and highlights so team members who missed a meeting can get up to speed quickly.
- Sales and customer calls: Record demos and calls to extract commitments, pricing details, and next steps for CRM updates and follow-up.
- Research and interviews: Preserve conversation context and visual references for analysis, quoting, and archival purposes.
- Training and onboarding: Capture training sessions and share searchable recordings as ongoing learning resources.
- Compliance and audit trails: Maintain accurate records of discussions and shown materials for regulatory, legal, or audit needs.
- Automatically capturing and preserving meeting context for later review
- Generating concise summaries and follow-up tasks after meetings
- Onboarding new team members with complete meeting records
- Reducing missed decisions or action items from distributed meetings
- Making meeting content searchable for compliance or reference
- Supporting remote collaboration by consolidating what was said and shown
