head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs Cherry Studio
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars, 57,202 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Cherry Studio has 53,202 stars, 5,164 forks, 1,514 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 388% (259,804 vs 53,202 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; Cherry Studio is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, Cherry Studio 10%. Hermes Agent was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (ai-agents, 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 | Cherry Studio | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 260K | ★ 53K |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 57K | ⑂ 5.2K |
| 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 Cherry Studio if
- You want the Cherry Studio feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and Cherry Studio 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 Cherry Studio
English Official Site Documents Development Feedback [![][deepwiki shield]][deepwiki link] [![][twitter shield]][twitter link] [![][discord shield]][discord link] [![][telegram shield]][telegram link] [![][github release shield]][github release link] [![][github nightly shield]][github nightly link] [![][github contributors shield]][github contributors link] [![][license shield]][license link] [![][commercial shield]][commercial link] [![][sponsor shield]][sponsor link] 🍒 Cherry Studio Cherry Studio is a desktop client that supports multiple LLM providers, available on Windows, Mac and Linux. 👏 Join Telegram…
read the full Cherry Studio overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or Cherry Studio more popular?
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars and Cherry Studio has 53,202. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and Cherry Studio free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and Cherry Studio under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and Cherry Studio?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and Cherry Studio 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 Cherry Studio?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (259,804 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Cherry Studio if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.