head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs octomind
Hermes Agent has 261,163 GitHub stars, 57,785 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. octomind has 593 stars, 74 forks, 21 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 43,941% (261,163 vs 593 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; octomind is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, octomind 12%. Hermes Agent was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (ai, ai-agents, claude-code), 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 | octomind | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 261K | ★ 593 |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-06 | 2026-11-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 58K | ⑂ 74 |
| 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 octomind if
- You want the octomind feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and octomind 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 octomind
Open source coding agent harness. One Rust binary, any model, every surface. Interactive, stdin, daemon, WebSocket, or ACP — one binary, one config. A supervising model plans and checks the work. Policy lives in TOML guardrails, not approval prompts. Website · Docs · Tap Registry · Benchmarks · Issues Octomind is an open source coding agent harness. It gives any LLM the tools to work in a repository — read and edit files, run shells, search code, delegate to sub agents — through MCP, and runs the result as an interactive CLI, a stdin pipe, a daemon, a WebSocket server, or an ACP agent in your editor. Most agents…
read the full octomind overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or octomind more popular?
Hermes Agent has 261,163 GitHub stars and octomind has 593. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and octomind free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and octomind under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and octomind?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and octomind 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 octomind?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (261,163 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose octomind if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.