head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs vellum-assistant
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars, 57,202 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. vellum-assistant has 1,470 stars, 229 forks, 179 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 17,574% (259,804 vs 1,470 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; vellum-assistant is written in TypeScript under MIT. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, vellum-assistant 16%. Hermes Agent was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (anthropic, claude, claude-code), 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 | vellum-assistant | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 260K | ★ 1.5K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 57K | ⑂ 229 |
| 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 vellum-assistant if
- You want the vellum-assistant feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and vellum-assistant 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 vellum-assistant
A personal AI assistant that evolves with you. 8 different types of memory (episodic, semantic, procedural, emotional, prospective, behavioral, narrative, shared) make it truly yours. It learns how you work, remembers what matters, and takes action across your apps. What It Does If you've set up a Personal AI on OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, or Claude Code, you know how long it takes, and how many times you have to hatch a new one to get it right. Vellum gets you the result you're looking for out of the box, one download away. Get Started 1. Sign up or download the app The desktop app is available for macOS and…
read the full vellum-assistant 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 vellum-assistant more popular?
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars and vellum-assistant has 1,470. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and vellum-assistant free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and vellum-assistant under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and vellum-assistant?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and vellum-assistant 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 vellum-assistant?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (259,804 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose vellum-assistant if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.