head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs Leon
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars, 57,202 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Leon has 17,629 stars, 1,479 forks, 112 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 1,374% (259,804 vs 17,629 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; Leon is written in TypeScript under MIT. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, Leon 8%. 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-agent), 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.
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Side by side
| Hermes Agent | Leon | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 260K | ★ 18K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 57K | ⑂ 1.5K |
| 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 Leon if
- You want the Leon feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and Leon 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 Leon
Leon Your open source personal AI assistant. I share Leon progress most regularly on X / @grenlouis Follow progress on X / @grenlouis · Website · Newsletter · Roadmap · Story ⚠️ Important Notice (as of 2026 03 29) [!IMPORTANT] Leon is currently focused on the 2.0 Developer Preview on the develop branch. The new documentation is not ready yet . The current docs site and older guides mostly reflect the legacy architecture. If you want the legacy, more stable pre agentic version of Leon, use the master branch. If you want to explore or contribute to Leon's new core, develop is the right place. The most accurate…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or Leon more popular?
Hermes Agent has 259,804 GitHub stars and Leon has 17,629. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and Leon free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and Leon under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and Leon?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and Leon 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 Leon?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (259,804 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Leon if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.