head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs Swirl Search
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars, 57,202 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Swirl Search has 3,051 stars, 292 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 7 days ago. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 8,415% (259,804 vs 3,051 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; Swirl Search is written in Python under Apache-2.0. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, Swirl Search 10%. 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 | Swirl Search | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 260K | ★ 3.1K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 57K | ⑂ 292 |
| 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 Swirl Search if
- You want the Swirl Search 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 Swirl Search 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 Swirl Search
SWIRL Community Federated AI search and RAG across your stack, without moving your data Ask a question. SWIRL searches your apps live, ranks the results, and returns an answer with sources you can click through to. Data stays where it lives. No vector database, no ETL, no second copy to govern. Open source, Apache 2.0, running on your machine in about two minutes. ⚡ Quick Start · 🧱 What you get · 🆚 Community vs Enterprise · 🔌 Connectors · 🤝 Contribute This repository is SWIRL Community , Apache 2.0 and free to self host. There is also SWIRL Enterprise , which adds a three pass reranker, canonical answers, an…
read the full Swirl Search overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or Swirl Search more popular?
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars and Swirl Search has 3,051. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and Swirl Search free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and Swirl Search under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and Swirl Search?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and Swirl Search 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 Swirl Search?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (259,804 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Swirl Search if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.