head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs pi
Hermes Agent has 259,569 GitHub stars, 57,127 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. pi has 119,393 stars, 15,324 forks, 202 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 117% (259,569 vs 119,393 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; pi is written in TypeScript under MIT. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, pi 13%. Hermes Agent was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | pi | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 260K | ★ 119K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 57K | ⑂ 15K |
| 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 pi if
- You want the pi feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and pi 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 pi
New issues and PRs from new contributors are auto closed by default. Maintainers review auto closed issues daily. See CONTRIBUTING.md. Pi Agent Harness This is the home of the Pi agent harness project including our self extensible coding agent. @earendil works/pi coding agent : Interactive coding agent CLI @earendil works/pi agent core : Agent runtime with tool calling and state management @earendil works/pi ai : Unified multi provider LLM API (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, …) To learn more about Pi: Visit pi.dev, the project website with demos Read the documentation, but you can also ask the agent to explain…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or pi more popular?
Hermes Agent has 259,569 GitHub stars and pi has 119,393. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and pi free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and pi under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and pi?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and pi 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 pi?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (259,569 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose pi if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.