OpenClaw QuickStart (9): The China IM Picker, with Honest Tradeoffs

Chapter 5 covered Telegram, DingTalk, and WeChat at a glance. This chapter is the sequel for everyone in mainland China who needed to ship something past their team’s IT department. There are too many channels, the docs are scattered across a dozen READMEs, and most of the “compare” tables online are out of date.

What follows is the matrix I check before recommending anything to anyone.

The seven channels worth knowing

Everything below assumes you’re using the openclaw-china plugin:

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openclaw plugins install https://github.com/BytePioneer-AI/openclaw-china.git

Or the wizard:

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npx @openclaw-china/setup

Then the choices:

Two notes: Feishu is officially listed as deprecated for new openclaw-china installs as of March 2026 — pick DingTalk or WeCom. WeChat public accounts in subscription mode have a 5-second passive reply window and cannot push proactively; service accounts and test accounts don’t.

The three-question picker

Don’t read the matrix top to bottom. Ask yourself three questions:

1. Who is on the other end? A coworker → DingTalk or WeCom long-poll. An external WeChat user → WeCom self-built app or WeChat customer service. Yourself → WorkBuddy.
2. Do you have a public IP? No → only DingTalk, WeCom long-poll, and WorkBuddy are options. Yes → everything is on the table.
3. Do you need group chat? Yes → DingTalk, WeCom long-poll, or WorkBuddy. The customer-service and public-account channels are 1:1 only.

In practice I land on one of two stacks:

• Internal team, no public IP: DingTalk for the human channel, WeCom long-poll as backup. Heartbeat patrols both.
• External WeChat reach: WeCom self-built app for the agent’s primary surface, WeChat customer service for inbound from non-tagged users.

DingTalk — the path that always works

Stream mode (long-poll) is the only reason DingTalk is fast to ship. No public IP, no domain verification, just register a bot and grab two values:

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{
  "channels": {
    "dingtalk": {
      "enabled": true,
      "mode": "stream",
      "clientId": "dingxxxxxxx",
      "clientSecret": "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
      "agents": ["main"]
    }
  }
}

Where to get those values: 钉钉开放平台 → 应用开发 → 创建企业内部应用 → 凭证与基础信息. Add the BotMessage permission scope. Publish the app inside your org (没发布的话机器人不会响应).

The most common failure: messages stop arriving after 30 minutes. Cause: the org’s network egress is rotating IPs and the long-poll connection is being killed mid-stream. Fix: bump the reconnect interval down to 60s in dingtalk.reconnectMs, and put the Gateway behind a stable egress.

WeCom — three flavors, pick by audience

The “WeCom” name covers three different APIs that share nothing except the brand:

• Smart bot (智能机器人, 长连接). Internal use only. No public IP needed. Easiest install. Streaming works.
• Self-built app (自建应用). Reaches external WeChat users if the org has the WeCom-WeChat互通 license. Requires public IP and a verified domain. No streaming.
• Customer service (微信客服). External WeChat users without the互通 license. Routes from public-account menus, mini-programs, video accounts, livestream entries. Markdown not supported.

For 90% of “we need a bot in our team” cases, the smart bot is what you want. The self-built app comes up when the goal is “talk to our customers on WeChat from inside our agent system” — and at that point you’re also going to want to read the WeChat专题 .

What I tell people who just want to play

WorkBuddy. It’s Tencent’s official QClaw bridge, runs on your desktop, no IP, no app review, talks to your real personal WeChat and QQ. It is the only “I just want my agent in WeChat tonight” answer that doesn’t end in regret.

The catch: it’s a desktop application, so it lives or dies with that machine being awake. Fine for a personal assistant. Bad for production.

The lesson behind the matrix

Channels are where the agent actually lives. A great agent on a flaky channel is a flaky agent. So before building anything fancy, pick the channel that matches your audience and your network, and over-invest in making that channel rock-solid. Then add a second one for redundancy.

Everything else is rearranging deck chairs.