Everything about the self-improving AI agent by Nous Research — from beginner to expert. Features, ecosystem, comparisons, and community, all in one place.
Hermes Agent is an open-source autonomous AI agent built by Nous Research — the lab behind the Hermes, Nomos, and Psyche model families. It lives on your server, remembers what it learns, builds its own skills, and reaches you on Telegram, Discord, Slack, or WhatsApp — wherever you are.
Hermes Agent Core
Memory · Skills · Gateway · Tools · Sandbox
Cross-session FTS5 recall with LLM summarization. Honcho dialectic user model. The longer it runs, the better it knows you.
Autonomously creates procedural skills from experience, improves them during use, and shares via agentskills.io open standard.
Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, Email, and CLI — unified gateway process. Start on one, continue on another.
Local, Docker, SSH, Daytona, Singularity, Modal. Container hardening, namespace isolation, command approval workflows.
Web search, browser automation, vision, image generation, TTS, and multi-model reasoning — all callable in a single conversation.
Spawn isolated sub-agents for parallel workstreams. RPC pipelines collapse multi-step workflows into zero-context-cost calls.
Self-Improving — creates and refines skills autonomously, getting more capable the longer it runs
Lives Everywhere — runs on a $5 VPS or GPU cluster, serverless on Daytona/Modal, or your laptop
Built by Model Trainers — created by Nous Research, who understand AI from the foundation up
Truly Open — MIT licensed, fully self-hosted, zero telemetry, community-driven skills marketplace
Hermes Agent vs. other AI agent frameworks — see what sets it apart.
| Dimension | Hermes | openclaw | AutoGPT | CrewAI | LangChain |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Self-Improving | |||||
| Persistent Memory | Partial | ||||
| Multi-Platform Msg | 5+ | 20+ | |||
| Terminal Backends | 6 | 2+ | 1 | ||
| Skills Marketplace | 520+ | 13K+ | |||
| Browser Automation | |||||
| Scheduled Automation | |||||
| Native Mobile Apps | |||||
| Voice Wake | |||||
| Self-Hosted | |||||
| License | MIT | Open Source | Apache 2.0 | MIT | MIT |
"One config replaced three of our chat bots. This is the one."
@opslead_marc
"Hermes on a $5 Hetzner box with load average 0.03. It is absurdly efficient."
@low_latency_dan
"The first self-hosted AI assistant I did not uninstall after a week."
@generalist_greg
"Honcho memory turned a chatbot into something that remembers how I actually work."
@memory_mori
"Self-optimized GPT guidance is the quiet revolution of 2026."
@dr_elena_ml
"Full MEDIA delivery on Signal means I finally have a private, encrypted line to my assistant."
@private_phoebe
"Credential pools saved my weekend. Three Anthropic keys rotating on autopilot."
@infra_priya
"Filesystem checkpoints plus /rollback is how I convince skeptics to try agents."
@secdev_sam
"One config replaced three of our chat bots. This is the one."
@opslead_marc
"Hermes on a $5 Hetzner box with load average 0.03. It is absurdly efficient."
@low_latency_dan
"The first self-hosted AI assistant I did not uninstall after a week."
@generalist_greg
"Honcho memory turned a chatbot into something that remembers how I actually work."
@memory_mori
"Self-optimized GPT guidance is the quiet revolution of 2026."
@dr_elena_ml
"Full MEDIA delivery on Signal means I finally have a private, encrypted line to my assistant."
@private_phoebe
"Credential pools saved my weekend. Three Anthropic keys rotating on autopilot."
@infra_priya
"Filesystem checkpoints plus /rollback is how I convince skeptics to try agents."
@secdev_sam
One command, zero prerequisites. Works on Linux, macOS, and WSL2. Self-hosted, open source, and free forever.
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/main/scripts/install.sh | bash