head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs Paperclip
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars, 57,202 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Paperclip has 110,292 stars, 18,270 forks, 5,464 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 136% (259,804 vs 110,292 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; Paperclip is written in TypeScript under MIT. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, Paperclip 17%. Paperclip was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (ai-agents, claude, claude-code), 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 | Paperclip | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 260K | ★ 110K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 57K | ⑂ 18K |
| 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 Paperclip if
- You want the Paperclip feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and Paperclip 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 Paperclip
Quickstart · Docs · GitHub · Discord · Twitter · Website Paperclip is the app people use to manage AI agents for work. Open source orchestration for teams of AI agents. If OpenClaw is an employee , Paperclip is the company . Paperclip is a Node.js server and React UI that orchestrates a team of AI agents to run a business. Bring your own agents, assign goals, and track work and costs from one dashboard. It looks like a task manager. Under the hood: org charts, budgets, governance, goal alignment, and agent coordination. Manage business goals, not pull requests. Works with…
read the full Paperclip overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or Paperclip more popular?
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars and Paperclip has 110,292. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and Paperclip free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and Paperclip under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and Paperclip?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and Paperclip 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 Paperclip?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (259,804 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Paperclip if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.