Ontheia (MCP-Client)

Ontheia — the self-hosted AI agent platform

Every time AI work runs on someone else's infrastructure, you give up more than privacy. You give up control over data, tools, workflows, and the rules that govern how work gets done.

Ontheiagives them back. It is open source, and it keeps AI capable and connected — within boundaries you set.

Most AI setups stay fragmented: separate chats, tools, scripts, and automations with no shared memory, no continuity, and no operational boundaries. Ontheia brings specialized agents, tools, memory, scheduling, and delegation into one governed work context — on your own infrastructure.

No single feature is the point. The shift comes from combining them.

An agent in Ontheia can break a request into subtasks and hand them to other specialized agents — each with its own tools, memory, and skills. They coordinate, remember across sessions, and act on their own schedule. A fresh install ships with two agents to start from: theOntheia Guidewalks you through setup, and aPersonal Assistantis ready to work.

This isn't a chat UI with plugins, prompt-based automation, or a bare agent runtime — it's an operational layer for sovereign AI work: agents that use your tools, retain context, coordinate capabilities, and operate over time, all inside one system you control.

- Specialized capabilities— use agents and Agent Skills instead of one generic assistant. Skills are reusable modules based on the open Agent Skills standard, and the built-inskill-creatorcan build and test new ones directly in chat.
- Delegation & coordination— hand work off across specialists with thedelegate-to-agenttool, either autonomously or as declarative Chain steps.
- Tools & external systems— Ontheia isMCP-native, so agents can connect to tools and services over an open standard instead of proprietary integrations.
- Persistent memory you can govern— built-in RAG withpgvector, isolated by user and namespace. Entries are filed by the kind of memory they are:episodic,semantic,procedural,working,document. That is what makes memory governable rather than merely searchable.
- Workflows— the visualChain Engineturns multi-step logic into no-code pipelines.
- Diagrams in chat— the agent writes Mermaid, the chat renders it live: flowcharts, sequence, class, ER, Gantt, state, mind maps, and more (12+ types). No render server, no export detour — a built-in skill keeps the syntax and layout clean.
- Files as artifacts, not walls of text— when an agent reads or writes a file, a card appears; one click opens it in a side panel with edit/preview, conflict-safe saving, and a built-in PDF viewer. Every code block in an answer carries a pencil: revise it in the panel and save it as a file. The agent stops repeating file contents in its answers and quotes only what it discusses — which also saves a substantial number of tokens.
- Scheduling— run recurring or one-time jobs automatically, including jobs that resume an existing chat where it left off.
- Vendor-agnostic— Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Ollama, or any OpenAI-compatible model. Switch providers without rewriting agents.
- Reasoning models, made visible— Ontheia speaks both reasoning paths: OpenAI's Responses API, so reasoning and function tools work together where chat completions no longer allows it, and Anthropic's extended thinking. Effort is configurable per model, thinking survives across tool iterations, and a dedicatedReasoning tabin the trace panel shows what the model actually thought — not just what it answered.
- Safe file handling— a built-infilesskill lets agents search, read, write, edit and move files with guarantees that make mistakes impossible, not just discouraged: writes never clobber (recoverable trash), edits need an exact match, and concurrent changes are caught by content hash. No config needed.
- Governance & control— self-hosted andGDPR-compliant by architecture— data never leaves your servers. Role-based access enforced with PostgreSQL Row Level Security; you decideper agentwhich model can access which data. In multi-user setups, per-user file access is enforced server-side — one user's agents can't reach another's files.

flowchart TB subgraph infra["🔒 Your Infrastructure"] UI[WebUI / Chat] --> A1[Agent] A1 --- SK[Skills] A1 --- MEM[Memory / RAG] MEM --- DB[(PostgreSQL + pgvector)] A1 -->|delegate-to-agent| A2[Sub-Agent] A1 --> CE[Chain Engine] A1 --> SCH[Scheduler] A1 --> TOOLS[MCP Tools / External Systems] A1 --> OLLAMA[Ollama<br/>local models] end A1 -.-> PROV[Cloud AI Providers<br/>Claude · GPT · Gemini · Grok] classDef external fill:#fff3cd,stroke:#d4a017,stroke-width:1px,color:#5c4400,font-weight:bold; class PROV external;

Everything that matters — chat history, memory, skills, workflows, schedules, tool connections — stays inside your infrastructure. Only the model inference call crosses the boundary, and you choose which provider gets it.

At least one AI provider API key is required to chat (e.g. Anthropic, OpenAI, or a local Ollama instance). Memory/RAG features additionally require an embedding-capable provider.

Guided setup(recommended) — one command, configures everything interactively:

curl -fsSL https://get.ontheia.ai | bash

This downloads Ontheia to~/ontheiaand runs the installer, which handles.envcreation, secret generation, Docker builds, database migrations, and bootstraps the first admin account.

Prefer to inspect the script first? Clone and run it from the repository:

git clone https://github.com/Ontheia/ontheia.git cd ontheia bash scripts/install.sh

git clone https://github.com/Ontheia/ontheia.git cd ontheia cp .env.example .env # Edit .env — set FLYWAY_PASSWORD, ONTHEIA_APP_PASSWORD, ADMIN_EMAIL docker compose up -d

Visithttp://localhost:5173in your browser.

Full installation guide:docs.ontheia.ai/en/getting-started/02_installation

SeeROADMAP.mdfor planned features across all horizons.

Community input is welcome — open anissueor start adiscussion.
- Fork the repository
- Create a feature branch
- Submit a pull request

Please readCONTRIBUTING.mdbefore opening a pull request.

If Ontheia resonates with you, a ⭐ helps others find it — and helps us build a community around sovereign AI.
- Open Source:GNU Affero General Public License v3.0— free for personal use, self-hosted deployments, and open-source projects.
- Commercial:Commercial License— for organizations that need to use Ontheia without AGPL obligations (e.g. as part of a proprietary product or managed service). Contact us viaontheia.aifor inquiries.

- Website:ontheia.ai
- GitHub Discussions:github.com/Ontheia/ontheia/discussions

M&A due diligence with 14 MCP tools for interactive chat — citation verification, cross-contract search, entity resolution, and sandboxed Excel/Word document generation across 9 specialist agent domains.