head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs open-duet
Hermes Agent has 256,298 GitHub stars, 55,989 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. open-duet has 6,059 stars, 748 forks, 2 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 4,130% (256,298 vs 6,059 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; open-duet is written in Python under Apache-2.0. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, open-duet 12%. open-duet was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (ai-agent), 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 | open-duet | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 256K | ★ 6.1K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-10-23 | 2026-10-23 |
| Forks | ⑂ 56K | ⑂ 748 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Hermes Agent if
- You weight community size — 256K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick open-duet if
- You want the open-duet feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and open-duet 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 open-duet
Open Duet: Open Source AI Coworkers You Run Yourself Open Duet is an open source, self hosted workspace for AI coworkers: named agents that each have a job, instructions, memory, their own workspace and isolated computer, a schedule, and a human approval step before they do anything risky. You chat with them in a browser, a desktop app or Telegram, hand them recurring routines, and keep their data and credentials on your own machine or server. It is an open alternative to Claude Duet and to other paid AI agent products such as OpenAI Dots, Meta Muse, Grok Bot, Instinct, Manus Cue, Claude Cowork, and ChatGPT…
read the full open-duet overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or open-duet more popular?
Hermes Agent has 256,298 GitHub stars and open-duet has 6,059. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and open-duet free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and open-duet under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and open-duet?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and open-duet 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 open-duet?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (256,298 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose open-duet if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.