head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs Minutes
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars, 57,202 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Minutes has 1,584 stars, 180 forks, 80 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 16,302% (259,804 vs 1,584 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; Minutes is written in Rust under MIT. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, Minutes 11%. 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, claude), 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 | Minutes | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 260K | ★ 1.6K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 57K | ⑂ 180 |
| 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 Minutes if
- You want the Minutes feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and Minutes 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 Minutes
minutes useminutes.app Minutes is a free, open source conversation memory app for the AI you already use. Record and transcribe meetings, calls, voice memos, and dictation on your device, then let Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or another MCP client search the history you choose to share. Your records are Markdown files you own in /meetings/ . Capture, transcription, and storage run locally. If you choose a cloud AI assistant or summarizer, the meeting context you authorize is sent to that provider. Your conversations. Your memory. Ready for the AI you use. Install If Homebrew reports an untrusted tap, run brew…
read the full Minutes overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or Minutes more popular?
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars and Minutes has 1,584. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and Minutes free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and Minutes under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and Minutes?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and Minutes 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 Minutes?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (259,804 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Minutes if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.