Vellum AI review: a good one-person assistant, and an open-source AI Operating System for a team

Vellum AI is a personal assistant for one person

Vellum is a personal AI assistant built for a single person. Vellum's own homepage describes it as a personal, secure assistant that you fully own and customise, that runs locally on your machine or in the cloud, and that remembers you across every conversation. It is native to Mac and reachable on iOS, Android, the web app, voice, email, Telegram, Slack and the terminal, with built-in skills for Google Workspace, Slack, Notion and your filesystem. By its own account it is shaped around one person's life, people, preferences and work.

Is Vellum AI good? What it gets right

As a one-person assistant, Vellum is good. It keeps long-term memory about you, offers a model choice that includes OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and open weights via Ollama, and asks for permission on tasks with security risks until you mark them trusted. Its memory and credentials vault live on your machine or in its cloud, and Vellum says none of your data is accessible to it unless you opt in. Cloud plans start at $30 per month on its Mighty tier, rising to $100 and $200 for Super and Ultra, checked October 2026 on Vellum's pricing page. Those are real strengths for one person who wants a private assistant.

Where a single-person assistant stops fitting

The limits appear when the work stops belonging to one person. Vellum's memory is built to remember you, and its credentials vault lives on your machine or in its cloud. A team needs the opposite shape: one shared memory, one place where tool access is scoped per agent, and one review step before work lands in the business. Vellum is built around a single person's inbox, calendar and preferences, so it holds one person's context well and is not designed to hold a company's whole configuration.

What a team needs: shared scope, isolation and review

Kortix is the open-source AI Operating System: your agents, their skills, your company memory, and every connector in one git repo you own. Each session runs on its own isolated cloud computer, so thousands can run in parallel on one config without sharing a machine. Tool access is scoped per agent and per call, with Allow, Ask and Block, and session work reaches main through a change request a person approves. That is the shape a team needs when the assistant's job grows from one person's notes to a shared queue. The Kortix vs Vellum comparison sets the two products side by side, and the Kortix blog draws the line between a personal agent and a company system.

How to decide in three questions

Three questions settle it. Who owns the work: one person's inbox and calendar, or a shared team queue. What you need to own: a personal memory on your device, or a company configuration in a repo you control. Who reviews the output: you as one person, or a person who approves a change request before it reaches the team. Vellum answers the first by design. Kortix answers the third, and self-host is free.