head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs catai
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars, 57,202 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. catai has 498 stars, 40 forks, 2 open issues and last shipped 12 months ago. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 52,069% (259,804 vs 498 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; catai is written in TypeScript under MIT. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, catai 8%. 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 (ai, chatgpt, 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 | catai | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 260K | ★ 498 |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2025-11-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 57K | ⑂ 40 |
| 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 catai if
- You want the catai feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and catai 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 catai
Catai 🚀 Exciting Updates Coming Soon! New UI , Function Calling , and more amazing features are on the way! Stay tuned for updates. Run GGUF models on your computer with a chat ui. Your own AI assistant runs locally on your computer. Inspired by Node Llama Cpp, Llama.cpp Installation & Use Make sure you have Node.js ( download current ) installed. Features Auto detect programming language 🧑💻 Click on user icon to show original message 💬 Real time text streaming ⏱️ Fast model downloads 🚀 CLI Install command Cross platform You can use it on Windows, Linux and Mac. This package uses node llama cpp which…
read the full catai overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or catai more popular?
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars and catai has 498. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and catai free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and catai under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and catai?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and catai 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 catai?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (259,804 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose catai if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.