head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs nanobot
Hermes Agent has 259,569 GitHub stars, 57,127 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. nanobot has 49,734 stars, 8,706 forks, 775 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 422% (259,569 vs 49,734 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; nanobot is written in Python under MIT. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, nanobot 18%. 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-agent, ai-agents), 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 | nanobot | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 260K | ★ 50K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-31 |
| Forks | ⑂ 57K | ⑂ 8.7K |
| 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 nanobot if
- You want the nanobot feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and nanobot 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 nanobot
English 简体中文 繁體中文 Español Français Bahasa Indonesia 日本語 한국어 Русский Tiếng Việt Discord · X · WeChat / Feishu nanobot 🐈 nanobot is an ultra lightweight, open source, self hosted personal AI agent framework written in Python. It runs in a WebUI, terminal, or chat apps and combines tools, long term memory, MCP integrations, model routing, multi agent delegation, scheduled automation, and an OpenAI compatible API in a small, readable core. Start Here What can nanobot do? nanobot is a self hosted personal AI agent runtime. It can: run in a browser WebUI or terminal connect to Telegram, Discord, Slack, WeChat, Email…
read the full nanobot overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Hermes Agent or nanobot more popular?
Hermes Agent has 259,569 GitHub stars and nanobot has 49,734. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and nanobot free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT and nanobot under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and nanobot?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and nanobot 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 nanobot?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (259,569 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose nanobot if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.