head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs oterm
Hermes Agent has 262,937 GitHub stars, 59,177 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. oterm has 2,447 stars, 141 forks, 4 open issues and last shipped 7 days ago. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 10,645% (262,937 vs 2,447 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; oterm is written in Python under MIT. Hermes Agent has attracted 23% as many forks as stars, oterm 6%. 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 (anthropic, 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 | oterm | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 263K | ★ 2.4K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-12 | 2026-11-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 59K | ⑂ 141 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Hermes Agent if
- You weight community size — 263K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick oterm if
- You want the oterm feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and oterm 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 oterm
oterm The terminal client for Ollama, OpenAI, Anthropic, and any pydantic ai supported provider. Install Full install methods, configuration, and usage: oterm Documentation . What's new See the CHANGELOG. License MIT License.
read the full oterm overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or oterm more popular?
Hermes Agent has 262,937 GitHub stars and oterm has 2,447. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and oterm free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and oterm under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and oterm?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and oterm 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 oterm?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (262,937 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose oterm if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.