head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs Jan
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars, 57,202 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Jan has 45,332 stars, 3,133 forks, 521 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 473% (259,804 vs 45,332 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; Jan is written in Rust under a custom or non-standard licence. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, Jan 7%. 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 (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 | Jan | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 260K | ★ 45K |
| License | MIT | Custom / other |
| Written in | Python | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 57K | ⑂ 3.1K |
| 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 Jan if
- You want the Jan feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and Jan 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 Jan
Jan Open source ChatGPT replacement English · 中文 · 日本語 Getting Started Community Changelog Bug reports Jan is bringing the best of open source AI in an easy to use product. Download and run LLMs with full control and privacy . Installation The easiest way to get started is by downloading one of the following versions for your respective operating system: Platform Download Windows jan.exe macOS jan.dmg Linux (deb) jan.deb Linux (AppImage) jan.AppImage Linux (Arm64) How to Download from jan.ai or GitHub Releases. Features Local AI Models : Download and run LLMs (Llama, Gemma, Qwen, GPT oss etc.) from HuggingFace…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or Jan more popular?
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars and Jan has 45,332. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and Jan free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT, and Jan has no licence declared in this registry. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and Jan?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and Jan in Rust. 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 Jan?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (259,804 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Jan if its feature set, stack or Custom / other licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.