head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs MaxKB
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars, 57,202 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. MaxKB has 23,095 stars, 3,210 forks, 18 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 1,025% (259,804 vs 23,095 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; MaxKB is written in Python under GPL-3.0. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, MaxKB 14%. 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 | MaxKB | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 260K | ★ 23K |
| License | MIT | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 57K | ⑂ 3.2K |
| 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 MaxKB if
- You want the MaxKB feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and MaxKB 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 MaxKB
Open source platform for building enterprise grade agents 强大易用的企业级智能体平台 [ 中文(简体) ] [ English ] MaxKB = Max Knowledge Brain, it is an open source platform for building enterprise grade agents. MaxKB integrates Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, supports robust workflows, and provides advanced MCP tool use capabilities. MaxKB is widely applied in scenarios such as intelligent customer service, corporate internal knowledge bases, academic research, and education. RAG Pipeline : Supports direct uploading of documents / automatic crawling of online documents, with features for automatic text splitting…
read the full MaxKB overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or MaxKB more popular?
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars and MaxKB has 23,095. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and MaxKB free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and MaxKB under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and MaxKB?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and MaxKB 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 MaxKB?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (259,804 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose MaxKB if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.