head to head · open source
Hermes Agent vs Open WebUI
Hermes Agent has 259,569 GitHub stars, 57,127 forks, 41,784 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Open WebUI has 157,498 stars, 22,901 forks, 294 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Hermes Agent leads on adoption by 65% (259,569 vs 157,498 stars). Hermes Agent is written in Python under MIT; Open WebUI is written in Python under a custom or non-standard licence. Hermes Agent has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, Open WebUI 15%. 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, 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 | Open WebUI | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 260K | ★ 157K |
| License | MIT | Custom / other |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 57K | ⑂ 23K |
| 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 Open WebUI if
- You want the Open WebUI feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and Open WebUI 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 Open WebUI
Open WebUI 👋 Open WebUI is a home for AI , a self hosted AI platform that's extensible , feature rich , user friendly, and built to run entirely offline . With support for Ollama and OpenAI compatible APIs , it gives you a powerful, provider agnostic interface for both local and cloud based models. Passionate about open source AI? Join our team → [!TIP] Looking for an Enterprise Plan? – Speak with Our Sales Team Today! For more information, be sure to check out our Open WebUI Documentation. Key Features of Open WebUI ⭐ 🚀 Effortless Setup : Install seamlessly via pip, uv, Docker, or Kubernetes (kubectl…
read the full Open WebUI 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 Open WebUI more popular?
Hermes Agent has 259,569 GitHub stars and Open WebUI has 157,498. Hermes Agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are Hermes Agent and Open WebUI free?
Both are open source. Hermes Agent is licensed under MIT, and Open WebUI has no licence declared in this registry. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Hermes Agent and Open WebUI?
Hermes Agent is written in Python and Open WebUI 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 Open WebUI?
Choose Hermes Agent if you want the larger community (259,569 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Open WebUI if its feature set, stack or Custom / other licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.