Hermes vs OpenClaw — Which Self-Hosted Agent Fits You?
Hermes Agent (Nous Research) and OpenClaw are the two biggest open-source, self-hosted personal agents. Both run on your own machine or server, answer you on Telegram, Discord and other chat apps, use skills, remember things between sessions, and run scheduled jobs. The differences are in the details: how memory and learning work, how much each does out of the box, and how tightly each is locked down by default.
The earlier version said Hermes has a "memory database with three memory types", runs as a hermes start daemon, and lacks WhatsApp and iMessage. None of that is true of current Hermes. Its memory is two small curated files plus searchable session history. It runs through a hermes gateway service, and it supports WhatsApp, and iMessage through BlueBubbles.
The short version
- Pick Hermes if you want an agent that learns: it writes and refines its own skills after tasks, keeps a curated memory, and ships a lot built in (desktop app, voice, kanban, goals, many providers).
- Pick OpenClaw if you want the biggest community and skills ecosystem, a strictly validated JSON config you control line by line, and the widest choice of wrappers and hosted versions, such as NemoClaw and IronClaw.
- Either works as a Telegram/Discord assistant with scheduled jobs. The first thing to get right is the model you run on, not which agent you pick.
Side by side
| Hermes Agent | OpenClaw | |
|---|---|---|
| Install | Desktop package, or curl … install.sh | bash; brings its own Python and Node | npm install or installer; needs Node 24.16+ (2026.9.3+) |
| Config | ~/.hermes/config.yaml + secrets in ~/.hermes/.env | ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json (JSON5, strictly validated: unknown keys stop the Gateway) |
| Memory | MEMORY.md (2,200 chars) + USER.md (1,375 chars), injected each session; full-text search over all past sessions; optional providers (Honcho, Mem0…) | Workspace Markdown files (MEMORY.md, daily notes) the agent reads and writes; memory plugins available |
| Learning | Background review saves memories and creates/updates skills after tasks; /journey shows what it learned | Skills are written by you or by the agent on request |
| Scheduling | hermes cron: natural-language schedules, per-job model, script-only jobs, jobs that remember previous runs | Heartbeat plus cron jobs in the Gateway |
| Multi-agent | Profiles, kanban board, hermes peer bot-to-bot messaging, desktop Bot Mode | agents.entries with explicit ownership and bindings |
| Channels | Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, Matrix, Mattermost, email, SMS, iMessage (BlueBubbles), Home Assistant and more | Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, iMessage, email and more |
| Command safety | Smart approvals on by default; user deny rules; hardline blocklist; optional Docker backend | Exec approvals and allowlists; Docker sandbox option |
| Interfaces | CLI, TUI, desktop app, web dashboard (localhost:9119), voice mode | CLI, Control UI (port 18789), macOS app |
| License / cost | MIT; you pay for the model (or a Nous Portal subscription) | MIT; you pay for the model |
Both projects ship fast: Hermes released 0.19 to 0.21.5 between July and September 2026, and OpenClaw releases roughly weekly. Check each project's release notes before relying on a detail.
When to choose Hermes
- You want the agent to get better at your recurring tasks without writing skills yourself.
- You want a lot out of the box: desktop app, voice, kanban and
/goalloops, 30+ providers including subscription sign-in for ChatGPT, Claude Max, SuperGrok and Copilot. - You want smart command approvals by default rather than configuring them.
- You run several personas and want each isolated as a profile with its own memory, skills and secrets.
When to choose OpenClaw
- You want the largest community, the most third-party skills, tutorials and hosted options.
- You prefer a single explicit config where anything unknown is rejected, not silently ignored.
- You plan to move to NemoClaw (OpenClaw in NVIDIA's OpenShell sandbox) or IronClaw (deny-by-default) later.
- You want the always-on "heartbeat" check-in pattern many OpenClaw guides are built around.
Moving from OpenClaw to Hermes
Hermes has an official importer. It always shows a preview first and makes a restore-point zip before changing anything:
hermes claw migrate --dry-run # preview only
hermes claw migrate # preview, then confirm
hermes claw migrate --preset full --migrate-secrets --yes # include API keysIt brings over SOUL.md, MEMORY.md and USER.md (daily memory files are merged in), skills from all four OpenClaw skill locations, your model and custom providers, MCP servers, Telegram/Discord/Slack/Signal/Matrix tokens and allowlists, TTS settings and your approval mode. API keys are only copied if you pass --migrate-secrets.
Anything without a direct equivalent is archived under ~/.hermes/migration/openclaw/<timestamp>/archive/ for you to recreate by hand. That includes HEARTBEAT.md (use cron jobs), OpenClaw cron jobs (hermes cron create), multi-agent lists (Hermes profiles), channel bindings and plugins. WhatsApp needs pairing again. Coming from Claude Code or Codex instead? Use hermes import-agent.
Running both
Plenty of people do: OpenClaw as the always-on chat assistant, Hermes for longer projects that should learn over time. Keep them apart:
- Separate bots. Give each its own Telegram or Discord bot token. Two agents polling one bot token fight over messages.
- Separate users on a server. Our VPS guide runs each agent as its own Linux user, with no shared home directory.
- Hand off through files, not shared memory. Don't point both at the same memory files; each rewrites them freely. Share a project folder, or have one agent send the other a summary.
- Watch the combined bill. Two always-on agents on a premium model add up. Run the second on a budget model (see the cost calculator).
Official sources
Checked against the Hermes Agent documentation (v0.21.5) on 2026-09-27. If anything here disagrees with these pages, trust the vendor docs.
← Back to Hermes hub · See also: Hermes Quick Start · OpenClaw Quick Start · IronClaw vs OpenClaw