head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs HuixiangDou
Hermes Agent has 259,569 GitHub stars, 57,127 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. HuixiangDou has 2,499 stars, 181 forks, 37 open issues and last shipped 11 months ago. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 10,287% (259,569 vs 2,499 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; HuixiangDou is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, HuixiangDou 7%. 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 (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 | HuixiangDou | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 260K | ★ 2.5K |
| License | MIT | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2025-11-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 57K | ⑂ 181 |
| 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 HuixiangDou if
- You want the HuixiangDou feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and HuixiangDou 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 HuixiangDou
🎚️ Upgrade HuixiangDou2(ACL25) is a GraphRAG solution whose effectiveness has been demonstrated in the plant science domain and that contributed to the cover paper in Cell X0008 8) Molecular Plant. If you work outside computer science, give the new release a try. English 简体中文 HuixiangDou1 is a professional knowledge assistant based on LLM. Advantages: 1. Design three stage pipelines of preprocess, rejection and response chat in group copes with group chat scenario, answer user questions without message flooding, see 2401.08772, 2405.02817, Hybrid Retrieval and Precision Report chat with repo for real time…
read the full HuixiangDou overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or HuixiangDou more popular?
Hermes Agent has 259,569 GitHub stars and HuixiangDou has 2,499. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and HuixiangDou free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and HuixiangDou under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and HuixiangDou?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and HuixiangDou in Python. 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 HuixiangDou?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (259,569 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose HuixiangDou if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.