head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs row-bot
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars, 57,202 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. row-bot has 1,684 stars, 201 forks, 30 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 15,328% (259,804 vs 1,684 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; row-bot is written in Python under Apache-2.0. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, row-bot 12%. 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 | row-bot | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 260K | ★ 1.7K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 57K | ⑂ 201 |
| 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 row-bot if
- You want the row-bot 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 row-bot 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 row-bot
Row Bot (formerly Thoth) Row Bot is a local first desktop AI assistant for doing real work with models, memory and tools. You talk to it in conversations; it remembers what matters in a local knowledge graph, works in the files, code folders, designs, workflows and channels you give it, delegates to focused agents, and asks before anything risky. It runs local models through Ollama, provider API keys, ChatGPT, Claude or Grok subscriptions, or any OpenAI compatible endpoint, and keeps your data on your machine. One React app serves the desktop window, browsers, phones and server mode. Features Conversations that…
read the full row-bot overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or row-bot more popular?
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars and row-bot has 1,684. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and row-bot free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and row-bot under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and row-bot?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and row-bot 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 row-bot?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (259,804 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose row-bot if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.