head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs OpenHands
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars, 57,202 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. OpenHands has 92,511 stars, 12,330 forks, 713 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 181% (259,804 vs 92,511 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; OpenHands is written in TypeScript under MIT. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, OpenHands 13%. Hermes Agent was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (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 | OpenHands | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 260K | ★ 93K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 57K | ⑂ 12K |
| 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 OpenHands if
- You want the OpenHands feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and OpenHands 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 OpenHands
Agent Canvas The self hosted developer control center for coding agents and automations. Run OpenHands, Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, or any ACP compatible agent across local, remote, and cloud backends. Quickstart Docs Self Hosting ACP Agents Automations Slack OpenHands Agent Canvas turns your coding agents into a self hosted, always on engineering team. It's a developer control center for starting conversations and automating everyday tasks — like generating reports that publish to Slack or automatically decomposing GitHub issues into tasks. It runs locally on your machine by default, but can connect to multiple…
read the full OpenHands overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or OpenHands more popular?
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars and OpenHands has 92,511. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and OpenHands free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and OpenHands under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and OpenHands?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and OpenHands in TypeScript. 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 OpenHands?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (259,804 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose OpenHands if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.