head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs sponge
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars, 57,202 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sponge has 2,869 stars, 270 forks, 42 open issues and last shipped 11 months ago. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 8,956% (259,804 vs 2,869 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; sponge is written in Go under MIT. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, sponge 9%. 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 | sponge | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 260K | ★ 2.9K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2025-12-15 |
| Forks | ⑂ 57K | ⑂ 270 |
| 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 sponge if
- You want the sponge feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and sponge 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 sponge
English 简体中文 Introduction Sponge is a powerful and easy to use Go development framework . Built on the core philosophy of "Definition is Code" , it aims to reshape the backend development experience through automatic generation technology, unleashing productivity and boosting development efficiency. Sponge deeply integrates a code generation engine , Gin (Web framework) , and gRPC (microservice framework) , covering the full software lifecycle from project generation, development, and testing to API documentation and deployment. Core Features: Definition Driven Development : Automatically parses SQL, Protobuf…
read the full sponge overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or sponge more popular?
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars and sponge has 2,869. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and sponge free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and sponge under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and sponge?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and sponge in Go. 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 sponge?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (259,804 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose sponge if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.