How is it self-hosted and what is open vs proprietary?
Licence; which components are in the repo; required services; what needs the hosted cloud.
Verdict
Both projects use the Apache-2.0 licence, but they depend on hosted services in different places. ACI puts the whole platform in the repo: the FastAPI server, 98 integrations, the CLI, Alembic migrations and the Next.js portal. Its Docker Compose stack runs pgvector Postgres, LocalStack KMS, a PropelAuth mock and the server. A production deployment needs a real KMS key, PropelAuth for portal login, an OpenAI key (search, app upsert and custom-instruction checks all use it), and optionally Stripe, Logfire and Sentry. The MCP server and the SDK are separate repos, but they only call this API.
Klavis has no central service to host. You run individual MCP server images, plus the Strata router (pip install strata-mcp) if you want it. Neither needs a database. Two features depend on Klavis’s cloud: the -oauth images get tokens from api.klavis.ai, and the bots’ production database module is missing from the repo. Without the cloud, you supply tokens yourself or use Strata’s local OAuth.
Choose ACI if you want to host a whole multi-tenant platform yourself. Choose Klavis if you want to self-host a few integrations without running a platform.
More projects in this category are being researched.
Per-project answers
Klavis-AI/klavis
answeredLicense: Apache 2.0 (LICENSE, open-strata/LICENSE). Open in repo: (1) 105 MCP server integrations; (2) Strata (open-strata/) with CLI, config, OAuth provider, BM25 search; (3) Docker OAuth wrapper (_oauth_support/); (4) MCP clients for Slack/Discord/Web/WhatsApp (mcp-clients/); (5) Fern codegen config. Self-host: pip install strata-mcp, configure ~/.config/strata/servers.json. No external database. Cloud-dependent: Klavis API for OAuth (oauth_acquire.sh:25-30, line 49). Managed Strata and SDKs are hosted. But Strata's own OAuth provider (auth_provider.py:160-200) works with standard OAuth independently.
aipotheosis-labs/aci
answeredThe repository is 100% open-source under Apache License 2.0 (LICENSE:1-201). The complete backend (FastAPI server, 98+ integrations, CLI, DB models, CRUD), frontend (Next.js dev portal), and Docker Compose setup are in the repo. To self-host, you need PostgreSQL with pgvector (compose.yml:5-19), LocalStack for AWS KMS emulation (compose.yml:35-46, used for encryption key management), and PropelAuth for auth (a mock is provided for dev, compose.yml:47-56). The server depends on OpenAI for embeddings — so an API key is required. Stripe handles billing (main.py:52). Logfire and Sentry provide observability but are optional (main.py:77-85). There is no proprietary cloud dependency — the ACI.dev hosted cloud (aci.dev) is a separate managed service; everything in this repo runs independently. The Unified MCP server is explicitly NOT in this repo — it lives at github.com/aipotheosis-labs/aci-mcp (README.md:21-24) and wraps the ACI.dev API. The Python SDK is also external. The frontend dev portal requires PropelAuth for login, which is the only component that needs an external identity provider when self-hosting (the mock replaces it for local dev).