Head to Head

Hermes Agent vs OpenClaw

Hermes Agent and OpenClaw compared on where they run, how your team reaches them, capabilities, live momentum and cost.

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HHermes Agent

OOpenClaw

Profile

Runs

Self-Hosted, Desktop

Where You Talk to It

Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Email, CLI, Desktop

WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, Web, CLI, Desktop

License

MIT

Pricing

Free and open source (MIT). You pay for the models and any hosted tools you use.

Free and open source (MIT). You pay for the model provider and the hardware you run it on.

Maintained by

Nous Research

OpenClaw Foundation

Best for

Users who want an assistant that gets better at their recurring work

Technical teams that want a self-hosted assistant across every chat app

Live Data

GitHub Stars

250.9K

–

Last Commit

Today

—

Vendor Status

–

Price per 1M Tokens (In / Out)

–

Capabilities

Local Models

Cloud Models

MCP Support

Strengths

Creates and refines skills from completed tasks, so repeat work gets faster.
Memory and past-conversation search carry context across sessions.
Runs locally, on a small VPS, or on serverless backends that sleep when idle.
Imports settings, memories and skills from an existing OpenClaw setup.

The largest community and skill ecosystem of any open source assistant.
Works in the chat apps your team already uses, from WhatsApp to Teams.
Model agnostic: use Claude, OpenAI models or local models and switch without rework.
Memory, credentials and state stay on your own hardware.
Run by an independent non-profit foundation, not a single vendor.

Trade-offs

Self-written skills need review, since the agent changes its own behaviour.
Many backends and options make the setup harder to reason about.
Some tools, such as web search or cloud browsers, need extra API keys or a Nous Portal plan.

Researchers have found well over 100,000 instances exposed to the internet with unsafe settings.
Hundreds of malicious skills were found on ClawHub, its community marketplace, including password stealers.
Tools run directly on the host unless you configure sandboxing yourself.
A large codebase with many settings, so setup and hardening take real effort.

Key Differences

OpenClaw is the more mature project, first released in 2025. Hermes Agent followed in 2026.

Head to Head in Numbers

Live data from GitHub and the package registries, refreshed every day.

GitHub stars

Hermes Agent: 250.9K
OpenClaw: –

Contributors

Hermes Agent: 4.2K
OpenClaw: –

Which One Should You Pick?

Hermes Agent

Pick Hermes Agent if you need: Users who want an assistant that gets better at their recurring work

Full Hermes Agent profile

OpenClaw

Pick OpenClaw if you need: Technical teams that want a self-hosted assistant across every chat app

Full OpenClaw profile

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Frequently Asked Questions

Straight answers to the questions we hear most often.

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Which is older, Hermes Agent or OpenClaw?

OpenClaw was first released in 2025 and Hermes Agent in 2026. A longer track record usually means more examples, integrations and answered questions.

What is the main difference between Hermes Agent and OpenClaw?

Hermes Agent runs as self-hosted, desktop. OpenClaw runs as self-hosted, desktop. That choice decides where your data lives, who maintains the agent and how fast you can roll it out.

Is Hermes Agent or OpenClaw cheaper?

Hermes Agent is open source and OpenClaw is open source. For both, the model bill usually matters more than the license. Use the agent cost calculator to estimate it for your workload.