head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs aichat
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars, 57,202 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. aichat has 10,536 stars, 747 forks, 104 open issues and last shipped 8 months ago. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 2,366% (259,804 vs 10,536 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; aichat is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, aichat 7%. 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, claude, 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 | aichat | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 260K | ★ 11K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-02-23 |
| Forks | ⑂ 57K | ⑂ 747 |
| 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 aichat if
- You want the aichat feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and aichat 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 aichat
AIChat: All in one LLM CLI Tool AIChat is an all in one LLM CLI tool featuring Shell Assistant, CMD & REPL Mode, RAG, AI Tools & Agents, and More. Install Package Managers Rust Developers: cargo install aichat Homebrew/Linuxbrew Users: brew install aichat Pacman Users : pacman S aichat Windows Scoop Users: scoop install aichat Android Termux Users: pkg install aichat Pre built Binaries Download pre built binaries for macOS, Linux, and Windows from GitHub Releases, extract them, and add the aichat binary to your $PATH . Features Multi Providers Integrate seamlessly with over 20 leading LLM providers through a…
read the full aichat overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or aichat more popular?
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars and aichat has 10,536. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and aichat free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and aichat under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and aichat?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and aichat in Rust. 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 aichat?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (259,804 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose aichat if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.