Motive icon

Motive

Background AI agent that lives in your menu bar and works autonomously

Free Cowork Open Source

Overview

Motive is a personal AI agent for macOS that runs tasks in the background from your menu bar. Describe what you need in natural language, and Motive executes it autonomously — interrupting only when decisions are required. Supports 17 AI providers including Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, and Ollama for fully offline use. Comes with 50+ built-in skills for browser automation, file organization, web research, code cleanup, and integrations with GitHub, Slack, Notion, and more. Three trust levels let you control how much autonomy the agent has. Built natively in Swift with credentials stored in macOS Keychain.

Minimum macOS: 15.0 (Sequoia)

Architecture: Apple Silicon, Intel

Key Features

  • Background task execution without user supervision
  • Menu bar resident with global hotkey (⌥Space)
  • 17 AI providers including Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, and Ollama
  • 50+ built-in skills for GitHub, Slack, Notion, Calendar, and more
  • Browser automation for web scraping and form filling
  • File organization and bulk renaming
  • Three trust levels: Careful, Balanced, and Yolo
  • Custom skill support via ~/.motive/skills/
  • 100% offline capability via Ollama
  • Credentials stored securely in macOS Keychain
  • Native Swift and SwiftUI application

Tags

text generationchatcode generationsummarizationweb searchother