head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs waku-agent
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars, 57,202 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. waku-agent has 2,126 stars, 418 forks, 24 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 12,120% (259,804 vs 2,126 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; waku-agent is written in Python under MIT. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, waku-agent 20%. 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 (ai-agent, claude, llm), 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 | waku-agent | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 260K | ★ 2.1K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-23 |
| Forks | ⑂ 57K | ⑂ 418 |
| 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 waku-agent if
- You want the waku-agent feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and waku-agent 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 waku-agent
waku agent Your own AI assistant. On your laptop. In code you can read in an afternoon. Meet Waku — a local first personal assistant that shows the four pillars behind every serious agent: Harness · Loop · Memory · Eval/LLM Ops . No frameworks hiding the good parts. Built by seanchen.io. Local first. Your memory is one SQLite file. Open it. Read it. It's yours. Memory is the hero. Semantic + episodic + procedural — with a gate that decides whether to remember, and a pass that decides what to keep. The loop is 95 lines of plain Python. Step through it. Watch it think. A local dashboard lights up every message as…
read the full waku-agent 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 waku-agent more popular?
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars and waku-agent has 2,126. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and waku-agent free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and waku-agent under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and waku-agent?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and waku-agent 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 waku-agent?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (259,804 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose waku-agent if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.