Building a company AI desktop stack: hunting a Claude Cowork alternative for non-technical staff
Feeling_Dog9493 · reddit · 2026-09-13
A technical lead is looking for a desktop AI assistant for non-technical employees (HR, admin, accounting, sales), aiming for an experience like Claude Cowork or GPT Work where users directly edit Excel, Word, and PPTX files with AI.
Current stack: LibreChat (no code-exec sandbox) + LiteLLM + Requesty.ai for model provision (EU-only, 5% markup), plus a centrally curated set of self-hosted MCPs.
Evaluated and rejected options:
- Cherry Studio: UI nightmare
- Goose and OpenWork: seem okay
- AionUI + OfficeCLI: most heavily tested, but error messages may scare users, and configs are written to a database rather than a file — no way to roll out models/MCPs via a shared config, would need a custom installer
- Claude with DevMode On plus models faking Claude: too restricted on tooling without an active Claude license
The poster is asking the community for recommendations; the core pain points are centralized config distribution and a non-technical-friendly UI/error experience.
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