head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs manifold
Hermes Agent has 260,630 GitHub stars, 57,485 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. manifold has 503 stars, 31 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 51,715% (260,630 vs 503 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; manifold is written in Go under MIT. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, manifold 6%. 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-agents, 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 | manifold | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 261K | ★ 503 |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-05 | 2026-10-22 |
| Forks | ⑂ 57K | ⑂ 31 |
| 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 manifold if
- You want the manifold feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and manifold 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 manifold
Manifold Manifold is an experimental platform for long horizon workflow automation with teams of AI assistants. It supports OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic models, along with OpenAI compatible APIs for self hosted open weight models served through llama.cpp or vLLM. [!WARNING] Manifold is an experimental frontier AI platform. Do not deploy it in production environments that require strong stability guarantees unless this README explicitly states otherwise. What Manifold does Manifold is built for workflows that go beyond one shot prompts. It gives you a workspace where specialists, tools, projects, and workflows…
read the full manifold overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or manifold more popular?
Hermes Agent has 260,630 GitHub stars and manifold has 503. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and manifold free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and manifold under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and manifold?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and manifold in Go. 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 manifold?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (260,630 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose manifold if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.