head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs Onyx
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars, 57,202 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Onyx has 33,170 stars, 4,692 forks, 451 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 683% (259,804 vs 33,170 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; Onyx is written in Python under a custom or non-standard licence. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, Onyx 14%. 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, chatgpt, 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 | Onyx | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 260K | ★ 33K |
| License | MIT | Custom / other |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 57K | ⑂ 4.7K |
| 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 Onyx if
- You want the Onyx feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and Onyx 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 Onyx
Onyx The Open Source AI Platform Onyx is the application layer for LLMs bringing a feature rich interface that can be easily hosted by anyone. Onyx enables LLMs through advanced capabilities like RAG, web search, code execution, file creation, deep research and more. Connect your applications with over 50+ indexing based connectors provided out of the box or via MCP. [!TIP] Deploy with a single command: ⭐ Features 🔍 Agentic RAG: Get best in class search and answer quality based on hybrid index + AI Agents for information retrieval Benchmark to release soon! 🔬 Deep Research: Get in depth reports with a multi…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or Onyx more popular?
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars and Onyx has 33,170. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and Onyx free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT, and Onyx has no licence declared in this registry. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and Onyx?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and Onyx 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 Onyx?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (259,804 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Onyx if its feature set, stack or Custom / other licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.