head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs botman
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars, 57,202 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. botman has 6,148 stars, 813 forks, 10 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 4,126% (259,804 vs 6,148 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; botman is written in PHP under MIT. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, botman 13%. Hermes Agent was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | botman | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 260K | ★ 6.1K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Python | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-04-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 57K | ⑂ 813 |
| 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 botman if
- You want the botman feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and botman 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 botman
BotMan If you want to learn how to create reusable PHP packages yourself, take a look at my upcoming PHP Package Development video course. About BotMan BotMan is a framework agnostic PHP library that is designed to simplify the task of developing innovative bots for multiple messaging platforms, including Slack, Telegram, Microsoft Bot Framework, Nexmo, HipChat, Facebook Messenger and WeChat. If you want to learn how to create reusable PHP packages yourself, take a look at my upcoming PHP Package Development video course. Documentation You can find the BotMan documentation at Stand Alone Configuration If you are…
read the full botman overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or botman more popular?
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars and botman has 6,148. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and botman free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and botman under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and botman?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and botman in PHP. 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 botman?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (259,804 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose botman if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.