head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs odysseus
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars, 57,202 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. odysseus has 94,935 stars, 1,862 forks, 1,233 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 174% (259,804 vs 94,935 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; odysseus is written in Python under AGPL-3.0. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, odysseus 2%. 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 | odysseus | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 260K | ★ 95K |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 57K | ⑂ 1.9K |
| 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 odysseus if
- You want the odysseus feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and odysseus 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 odysseus
A self hosted AI workspace for chat, agents, research, documents, email, notes, calendar, and local model workflows. Quick Start · Setup Guide · Contributing · Roadmap Quick Start dev is the default branch and gets the newest changes first. Use main if you want the more curated branch. Open when the containers are healthy. The first admin password is printed in docker compose logs odysseus . Native installs, GPU notes, Windows/macOS instructions, HTTPS, and configuration live in the setup guide. Features Chat + Agents — local/API models, tools, MCP, files, shell, skills, and memory. Cookbook — hardware aware…
read the full odysseus overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or odysseus more popular?
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars and odysseus has 94,935. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and odysseus free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and odysseus under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and odysseus?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and odysseus 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 odysseus?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (259,804 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose odysseus if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.