DeerFlow 🤖 Agent Open source

What it does

DeerFlow is ByteDance's open-source super agent harness. Version 2 is a full rewrite built on LangGraph and LangChain: a lead agent plans work, spawns subagents, runs code in a sandbox, keeps long-term memory and loads skills on demand. It started as a deep-research tool and now also writes code, builds web pages and produces reports and slides. It is a self-hosted application with a web workspace, not a plugin for an existing editor.

What is inside

The stack includes a gateway, a web UI, a terminal workbench and an embedded Python client. Skills follow the standard SKILL.md format and load progressively, and you can import .skill archives or export your own. MCP servers can be added with OAuth support, and the sandbox can run locally or in containers. Other parts cover session goals, manual context compaction, projects with document shelves, scheduled tasks, browser control, and chat connectors for Slack, Telegram, Feishu and others. Tracing hooks exist for LangSmith, Langfuse and Monocle. A claude-to-deerflow skill lets Claude Code send tasks to a running DeerFlow instance and manage its threads.

Works with

DeerFlow runs on its own. It can use Codex CLI or Claude Code credentials as model providers, and the bundled skill connects Claude Code to it.

How to install

git clone https://github.com/bytedance/deer-flow.git
cd deer-flow
make setup

npx skills add https://github.com/bytedance/deer-flow --skill claude-to-deerflow

Maintenance and safety

MIT licensed, very active and backed by a large team. The README carries a clear security notice: the agent can run system commands, it binds to localhost by default, and gateway admin access equals code execution on the host. Do not expose it without an allowlist and authentication in front. Setup needs Docker or Python 3.12 and Node 22.

Who should use it

Teams that want a self-hosted, general agent for research-plus-code tasks and are comfortable running a multi-service stack. If you just want help inside your editor, a coding agent plugin is a lighter choice.