head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs Sidekick
Hermes Agent has 259,569 GitHub stars, 57,127 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Sidekick has 3,321 stars, 146 forks, 37 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 7,716% (259,569 vs 3,321 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; Sidekick is written in Swift under MIT. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, Sidekick 4%. 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 (ai, ai-agents), 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Hermes Agent | Sidekick | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 260K | ★ 3.3K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Swift |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-09-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 57K | ⑂ 146 |
| 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 Sidekick if
- You want the Sidekick feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Swift
- You evaluated both and Sidekick 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 Sidekick
Sidekick Chat with a local LLM that can respond with information from your files, folders and websites on your Mac without installing any other software. All conversations happen offline, and your data stays secure. Sidekick is a local first application –– with a built in inference engine for local models, while accommodating OpenAI compatible APIs for additional model options. Sidekick supports modern GGUF local models such as Qwen3.5 out of the box through its built in llama.cpp backend. Example Use Let’s say you're collecting evidence for a History paper about interactions between Aztecs and Spanish troops…
read the full Sidekick overview →
More in AI & Machine Learning
Related comparisons
More AI Interaction & Interfaces projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the AI Interaction & Interfaces field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or Sidekick more popular?
Hermes Agent has 259,569 GitHub stars and Sidekick has 3,321. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and Sidekick free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and Sidekick under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and Sidekick?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and Sidekick in Swift. 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 Sidekick?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (259,569 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Sidekick if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.