Easel Open source

What is Easel?

Easel is an open-source AI agent built by the ZJU-REAL research lab (a Zhejiang University and Peking University collaboration) that automates the day-to-day work of running social media accounts. Instead of bolting AI onto a single step like caption writing, Easel chains together more than 112 built-in skills to cover the whole loop: spotting what's trending, planning a content calendar, generating text, images and video, adapting each post for the target platform, publishing it, and then studying the results to inform the next round. It ships as a self-hosted project with both a local web workbench and a command-line interface, and it is released under the permissive Apache 2.0 license.

Who it is for

Easel is aimed at solo creators, small social teams and agencies who manage accounts across Chinese platforms — Xiaohongshu (RED), Douyin, Bilibili, Zhihu, Kuaishou and WeChat Video Accounts — and want to reduce the manual grind of research, drafting and cross-posting. It also suits developers and researchers who want an extensible, code-first agent framework for content operations rather than a closed SaaS dashboard. Because it requires installing and running the software yourself, it's a better fit for technically comfortable users than for someone who wants a one-click hosted app.

Key features

• Trend discovery — scans supported platforms for what's currently resonating in a given niche before you start writing
• Content planning — builds a strategy and posting plan rather than generating one-off posts in isolation
• Multi-format generation — produces text, images and video assets for a post from a single brief
• Platform adaptation — reformats and retunes the same core content for each target network's conventions
• Direct publishing — pushes finished posts live to six or more platforms through browser automation, no manual copy-paste
• Performance attribution — tracks what worked and feeds that back into future planning
• Persistent account profiles — retains brand voice and account knowledge across sessions instead of starting from zero each time
• Dual interface — a web-based workbench for visual control plus a terminal/CLI mode for scripting and automation

Pricing

Easel is free and open-source under the Apache 2.0 license. There is no paid tier or hosted version listed on the project site — you self-host it on your own machine or server. Running it does require a valid LLM API key (Anthropic Claude, OpenAI or a compatible provider), and optional add-ons like video generation, music or voice synthesis depend on third-party APIs that carry their own costs. The vendor site does not list specific compute or API cost estimates.

Strengths

The biggest draw is scope: Easel tries to own the entire content pipeline — discovery, creation, publishing and learning — rather than a single slice of it, which is unusual for an open-source project. Being Apache 2.0 licensed with 900+ GitHub stars and active commit history means teams can inspect, modify and self-host it without recurring subscription costs, and the persistent account-profile system means the agent doesn't relearn your brand voice every session. Real publishing via browser automation (rather than just draft export) is also a meaningful step beyond most AI content generators.

Weaknesses

The self-hosted-only model is a real barrier: you need Linux, macOS or Windows 10+, Python 3.10+, Node.js 22.19+ and FFmpeg installed correctly before it runs, plus your own LLM API key to pay for usage. There's no managed cloud option for teams that don't want to run infrastructure. The platform list also skews heavily toward Chinese social networks, so creators focused purely on Instagram, TikTok or X will find limited direct value today, and as a young academic-lab project it lacks the long-term support guarantees of a commercial vendor.

Getting started

Clone the GitHub repository and run the provided setup.sh script (or the PowerShell equivalent on Windows), which installs dependencies and starts a local web interface on port 7860. From there you configure an LLM API key, connect the social accounts you want to manage, and use either the web workbench or CLI commands to run discovery, planning, creation and publishing skills.

Verdict

Easel is a genuinely ambitious open-source take on end-to-end social media automation, and it's worth a look for technical teams already invested in Xiaohongshu, Douyin or similar platforms who want a free, hackable alternative to closed automation tools. Compare it against other options in AI Agents \u0026 Automation, and see how dedicated social tools like Buffer and Predis.ai handle scheduling and generation for Western-platform-focused teams, before committing engineering time to self-hosting it.