head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs chatbox
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars, 57,202 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. chatbox has 42,236 stars, 4,303 forks, 1,290 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 515% (259,804 vs 42,236 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; chatbox is written in TypeScript under GPL-3.0. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, chatbox 10%. Hermes Agent was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (chatgpt, claude, claude-code), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Hermes Agent | chatbox | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 260K | ★ 42K |
| License | MIT | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-29 |
| Forks | ⑂ 57K | ⑂ 4.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Hermes Agent if
- You weight community size — 260K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick chatbox if
- You want the chatbox feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and chatbox fits your workflow better
About Hermes Agent
Hermes Agent ☤ Hermes Agent Hermes Desktop The self improving AI agent built by Nous Research. It's the only agent with a built in learning loop — it creates skills from experience, improves them during use, nudges itself to persist knowledge, searches its own past conversations, and builds a deepening model of who you are across sessions. Run it on a $5 VPS, a GPU cluster, or serverless infrastructure that costs nearly nothing when idle. It's not tied to your laptop — talk to it from Telegram while it works on a cloud VM. Use any model you want — Nous Portal, OpenRouter, OpenAI, your own endpoint, and many…
read the full Hermes Agent overview →
About chatbox
English 简体中文 Chatbox (Community Edition) Your Ultimate AI Copilot on the Desktop. Chatbox is a desktop client for ChatGPT, Claude and other LLMs, available on Windows, Mac, Linux This is the repository for the Chatbox Community Edition, open sourced under the GPLv3 license. Chatbox is going open source Again! We regularly sync code from the pro repo to this repo, and vice versa. Download Desktop Windows MacOS Linux Setup.exe Intel Apple Silicon AppImage iOS/Android .APK For more information: chatboxai.app Quick Start For End Users 1. Download the appropriate installer for your platform from the releases page 2…
read the full chatbox overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or chatbox more popular?
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars and chatbox has 42,236. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and chatbox free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and chatbox under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and chatbox?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and chatbox in TypeScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Hermes Agent or chatbox?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (259,804 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose chatbox if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.