head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs kotaemon
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars, 57,202 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kotaemon has 25,849 stars, 2,164 forks, 247 open issues and last shipped 4 months ago. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 905% (259,804 vs 25,849 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; kotaemon is written in Python under Apache-2.0. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, kotaemon 8%. Hermes Agent was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | kotaemon | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 260K | ★ 26K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-07-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 57K | ⑂ 2.2K |
| 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 kotaemon if
- You want the kotaemon feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and kotaemon 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 kotaemon
kotaemon An open source clean & customizable RAG UI for chatting with your documents. Built with both end users and developers in mind. Live Demo 1 Live Demo 2 Online Install Colab Notebook (Local RAG) User Guide Developer Guide Feedback Contact Introduction This project serves as a functional RAG UI for both end users who want to do QA on their documents and developers who want to build their own RAG pipeline. For end users Clean & Minimalistic UI : A user friendly interface for RAG based QA. Support for Various LLMs : Compatible with LLM API providers (OpenAI, AzureOpenAI, Cohere, etc.) and local LLMs (via…
read the full kotaemon overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or kotaemon more popular?
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars and kotaemon has 25,849. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and kotaemon free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and kotaemon under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and kotaemon?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and kotaemon 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 kotaemon?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (259,804 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose kotaemon if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.