head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs ai
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars, 57,202 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. ai has 3,325 stars, 380 forks, 89 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 7,714% (259,804 vs 3,325 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; ai is written in TypeScript under MIT. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, ai 11%. Hermes Agent was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 4 topic tags (ai, ai-agents, anthropic, llm), 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 | ai | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 260K | ★ 3.3K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 57K | ⑂ 380 |
| 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 ai if
- You want the ai feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and ai 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 ai
TanStack AI Type safe, provider agnostic TypeScript SDK for building streaming chat, tool calling agents, structured outputs, realtime voice, media generation, and framework native AI apps. TanStack AI is built from composable activities and provider adapters. Use one provider or switch between many. Import only chat, or add image, audio, video, speech, transcription, summarization, realtime, Code Mode, devtools, and framework bindings as your app needs them. Read the docs Agent Skills Teach your coding agent TanStack AI before you write a line. The skills in skills/ are user level: install once, and in every…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or ai more popular?
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars and ai has 3,325. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and ai free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and ai under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and ai?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and ai 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 ai?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (259,804 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose ai if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.