Channels — one gateway, every inbox.

What's bundled

• WhatsApp via Baileys
• Telegram via grammY
• Slack via Bolt
• Discord via discord.js
• Signal via signal-cli
• iMessage via BlueBubbles
• Microsoft Teams Graph API
• Matrix matrix-js-sdk
• LINE official SDK
• Lark / Feishu official SDK
• Google Chat webhooks
• WebChat embeddable widget

How pairing works

Each tenant pairs each channel separately. The pairing flow varies by channel — WhatsApp shows a QR code; Telegram needs a bot token; Slack runs an OAuth dance; Discord wants an invite link. The CLI walks you through it; the same flows are exposed as JSON-RPC methods if you want to build your own pairing UI.

# WhatsApp: scan a QR code on your phone
openclaw channels pair whatsapp --tenant acme

# Telegram: paste the bot token from BotFather
openclaw channels pair telegram --tenant acme --token 1234567:ABC...

# Slack: opens the OAuth URL in your browser
openclaw channels pair slack --tenant acme

# Discord: paste the bot token
openclaw channels pair discord --tenant acme --token <token>

Inbound routing

Inbound messages from any channel are normalized into a common envelope:

{
  "tenant": "acme",
  "channel": "whatsapp",
  "user": {
    "id": "wa:+15551234567",
    "display_name": "Jane Doe"
  },
  "session_id": "wa:+15551234567:default",
  "content": {
    "type": "text",
    "text": "How many invoices are overdue?"
  },
  "received_at": "2026-06-03T10:14:22Z"
}

The agent runtime sees this normalized envelope, not the raw channel payload. Reply messages are translated back into channel-native form by the adapter — markdown becomes rich text on Slack, plain on WhatsApp.

Cross-channel identity

By default, each channel's user IDs are namespaced (e.g. wa:+1..., tg:12345) so the same human talking to your bot on WhatsApp and Slack gets two separate sessions. To unify identities, the tenant config can define a mapping table or a callback that resolves a canonical user ID.

identity:
  resolve: |
    # JS expression; returns the canonical user ID
    if (channel === 'slack') return 'slack-' + user.id
    if (channel === 'whatsapp') return phone_to_canonical(user.id)
    return channel + ':' + user.id

Adding your own channel

The channel adapter contract is small: parse inbound, normalize, push to the gateway; receive outbound, translate, send. New channels (LINE Bizz, Twitter DMs, customer support widgets) plug in with about 200 lines of adapter code. See the channel adapter docs on GitHub.