Hermes Agent
Nous Research's MIT-licensed, self-hosted agent that remembers projects and writes its own skills.
Quick verdict
- Best for
- Developers who want an agent they control end to end
- Pricing
- Free (MIT, bring your own model); hosted Nous Portal subscriptions; enterprise pricing for Hermes for Businesses
- Not ideal if
- Self-hosting and configuration are on you
What is Hermes Agent?
Hermes Agent is an open-source autonomous agent from Nous Research, released under the MIT licence in February 2026. It keeps persistent memory across sessions, creates reusable skills as it works, ships 70+ built-in tools (web search, browser automation, vision, image generation, text-to-speech), connects through 20+ messaging gateways including Telegram, Slack, WhatsApp, Discord, and Signal, and runs on any model provider from local to OpenRouter. It runs locally or in the cloud on macOS, Windows, and Linux. On October 7, 2026 Nous raised $90 million to launch Hermes for Businesses, an enterprise version with SSO, audit logging, and self-hosting.
Key features
- Persistent memory and automatic skill creation
- 70+ built-in tools
- 20+ messaging gateways (Telegram, Slack, WhatsApp, Discord, Signal, email)
- Any model provider; local to serverless deployment
- Streaming voice and agent-to-agent protocol (v0.20, August 2026)
Pros
- Permissive MIT licence and a very large community
- Works where you already chat rather than in a new app
- Model-agnostic — no vendor lock-in
Cons
- Self-hosting and configuration are on you
- Broad tool access needs careful permissioning
- Adoption figures (24M+ clones) are the company's own
Best for
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