head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs hob
Hermes Agent has 261,463 GitHub stars, 57,966 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. hob has 516 stars, 42 forks, 2 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 50,571% (261,463 vs 516 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; hob is written in TypeScript under MIT. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, hob 8%. 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-agent, 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 | hob | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 261K | ★ 516 |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-07 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 58K | ⑂ 42 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Hermes Agent if
- You weight community size — 261K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick hob if
- You want the hob feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and hob 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 hob
Hob An easier way to use AI on your own computer. A free, open source alternative to Claude and ChatGPT. Visit hob.chat → · Download for Mac · Windows · Linux Fill out PDFs, work through documents, and much more. Free, private, and works offline. Hob picks the best frontier open weight model that fits your computer and sets everything up for you. Help · Contributing · MIT license Made by Frigade .
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Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or hob more popular?
Hermes Agent has 261,463 GitHub stars and hob has 516. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and hob free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and hob under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and hob?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and hob 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 hob?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (261,463 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose hob if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.