head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs motty
Hermes Agent has 260,834 GitHub stars, 57,590 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. motty has 663 stars, 70 forks, 132 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 39,241% (260,834 vs 663 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; motty is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, motty 11%. 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 | motty | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 261K | ★ 663 |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-05 | 2026-11-05 |
| Forks | ⑂ 58K | ⑂ 70 |
| 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 motty if
- You want the motty feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and motty 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 motty
English 简体中文 日本語 Motty: SSH, SFTP, port forwarding, VNC/RDP and an AI assistant in one native window. Motty is a native desktop SSH workspace. It is built in Go on Viva, so it has no Electron runtime, no embedded browser and no JavaScript layer. One window holds the terminal, files, tunnels, remote desktops and the assistant. Why Motty? 🪶 Native by construction Viva talks to Metal, Direct3D and Vulkan directly. Motty starts fast, idles without frame churn, and ships without a browser engine. 🗂 One window for the session Terminal, SFTP, forwarding, VNC/RDP and the assistant share one workspace. No second app…
read the full motty overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or motty more popular?
Hermes Agent has 260,834 GitHub stars and motty has 663. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and motty free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and motty under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and motty?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and motty 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 motty?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (260,834 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose motty if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.