Hermes Agent: Nous Research's open-source personal agent, explained

What Hermes Agent is

• Made by Nous Research; open source under MIT. The GitHub repository, github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent, had more than 263,000 stars on November 14, 2026, and the latest release was v0.23.1 on November 10. The official site is hermes-agent.nousresearch.com.
• A learning loop: it writes skills from what it does, refines them during use, keeps agent-curated memory and searches its past sessions.
• One agent, many places: a terminal UI, the Hermes desktop app, and Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal and email through one gateway process.
• Any model: switch providers with hermes model, including Nous Portal, OpenRouter, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, DeepSeek, AWS Bedrock, Ollama Cloud, and local models through LM Studio.
• Runs where you put it: your laptop or a server ("a $5 VPS, a GPU cluster, or serverless infrastructure"), with six terminal backends: local, Docker, SSH, Modal, Daytona and Vercel Sandbox.
• Scheduled work: a built-in cron scheduler that can deliver results to any connected platform.

How to install Hermes Agent

From the README's Quick Install, checked November 14, 2026. The installer takes care of Hermes's dependencies.

1. Run the installer

   One line on macOS, Linux, WSL2 or Android through Termux; a PowerShell line on native Windows, which Hermes supports without WSL.

   # macOS, Linux, WSL2 or Android (Termux)
   curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash
   
   # Native Windows (PowerShell)
   iex (irm https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.ps1)

2. Set it up and pick a model

   The setup wizard configures everything at once and offers to import settings from OpenClaw, Claude Code, Codex or Cursor if it finds them. hermes setup --portal signs you in to Nous Portal instead of collecting API keys.

   hermes setup     # the full setup wizard
   hermes model     # choose your model provider and model
   hermes           # start a conversation in the terminal

3. Talk to it from your chat apps

   Start the gateway and send your bot a message. Unknown senders have to be paired before Hermes answers them.

   hermes gateway setup   # connect Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal or email
   hermes gateway start

Hermes Agent docs

Hermes Agent desktop app

Hermes Desktop runs on macOS 12 or later, Windows 10 and 11 (from the Microsoft Store or an .exe) and Linux, and is linked from the official site. In the desktop app you can also choose the provider, model and limits for the subagents Hermes spawns for parallel work.

Bot Mode: several named Bots

Bot Mode turns Hermes profiles into named Bots, "each with its own chat, role, model, memory, skills, and avatar". Bots message each other directly with a message_agent tool, share group chats, and can each have routines that show up in hermes cron list. The message_agent tool works only in Bot Chat sessions on Bot Mode installs, not in regular chats or the CLI.

Hermes Agent pricing

The agent is free under MIT; you pay whichever model provider you use. Nous Research also sells an optional Nous Portal subscription for models and hosted tools, with prices shown per month. More in Hermes Agent pricing.

How Hermes Agent asks before acting

• Approvals default to smart: a helper model denies clearly dangerous commands, approves low-risk ones, and sends uncertain ones to you. No answer within 300 seconds counts as deny. You can switch to manual or off.
• Unattended runs, such as cron jobs and webhooks, deny commands that need approval by default.
• On the Docker backend the container is the security boundary, so the dangerous-command checks are skipped.

Hermes Agent vs Grok Bot, OpenClaw and other agents

• Grok Bot: xAI's hosted AI teammates, from $30 a month, running in xAI's cloud. Hermes Agent is free and self-hosted, with Bot Mode for named Bots. See Grok Bot vs Hermes Agent.
• OpenClaw: another open-source personal assistant (MIT) that answers in your chat apps from a local gateway. See Hermes Agent vs OpenClaw.
• Rakazo, OpenMausBot and OpenBot: open-source Grok Bot-style bot workspaces. OpenMausBot can even run Hermes as one of its bots. See Rakazo vs Hermes Agent, OpenMausBot vs Hermes Agent and OpenBot vs Hermes Agent.
• Claude Code: Anthropic's coding agent. See Hermes Agent vs Claude Code, and more options in Hermes Agent alternatives.

A personal agent for you, AI employees for the work

Hermes Agent is one agent that learns your tasks. Crewmark is an issue tracker for a team of AI employees: each one is a Claude Code or Codex conversation on your own computer, with a role, KPIs and projects, and other agents connect through ACP. Employees take issues from a shared board, wake on a heartbeat during working hours, and set an issue to Needs action when they need you.

Crewmark is open source (GPL-3.0) and self-hostable, and free for 1 project with up to 3 AI employees; you keep paying your agent provider as usual.

1. Pick a role

   Start from the AI employee roles and write its KPIs and projects.

2. Put the work on a board

   Assign issues and make regular ones repeat daily, weekly or monthly.

3. Set working hours

   A heartbeat between 15 minutes and 24 hours keeps each employee's issues moving. More in multi-agent harness.

Hermes Agent FAQ