We chose raw OpenClaw over NemoClaw. Six months later, here is our honest assessment.

When NVIDIA released NemoClaw we seriously considered switching from our raw OpenClaw deployment. We stayed with raw. Here's why and what happened:

Why we stayed:
- Full control over agent behavior and data flow
- No vendor lock-in on the orchestration layer
- Our team had already built custom tooling

What went well:
- Complete visibility into agent decisions
- Ability to patch vulnerabilities same-day
- Custom integrations with our African payment providers that NemoClaw doesn't support

What hurt:
- 2x more engineering time than estimated
- We had to build our own monitoring from scratch
- Recruiting engineers who understand OpenClaw internals is very hard

Honest take: if I started fresh today with a smaller team, I'd probably go NemoClaw. The raw path is only worth it if you have 3+ engineers who can commit full-time and your use case requires deep customization.

For everyone else — the managed route saves you pain.