head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs eliza
Hermes Agent has 259,569 GitHub stars, 57,127 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. eliza has 19,754 stars, 5,859 forks, 1,069 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 1,214% (259,569 vs 19,754 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; eliza is written in TypeScript under MIT. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, eliza 30%. Hermes Agent was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (ai), 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 | eliza | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 260K | ★ 20K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 57K | ⑂ 5.9K |
| 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 eliza if
- You want the eliza feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and eliza 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 eliza
elizaOS Your agentic operating system. Eliza · Eliza Cloud · elizaOS downloads · Documentation · App catalog elizaOS is an open source TypeScript framework and product stack for autonomous AI agents. This monorepo contains the core runtime, the Eliza app, the CLI, cloud services, native bridges, and first party plugins. The bootable Linux and Android distributions live in the separate elizaOS/os repository. Choose a starting point Run Eliza from source The repository pins Bun and Node versions in package.json . Install those versions, then: bun install also prepares submodules and patches, provisions supported…
read the full eliza overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or eliza more popular?
Hermes Agent has 259,569 GitHub stars and eliza has 19,754. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and eliza free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and eliza under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and eliza?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and eliza 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 eliza?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (259,569 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose eliza if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.