Both are open source harness options with comparable terms, so the choice comes down to which model of the problem you prefer — compare the descriptions below rather than the licence.
Self-improving agent from Nous Research — writes its own skills from experience and carries them forward.
The learning loop is the point: it creates skills after complex tasks and searches its own past sessions. Runs anywhere from a $5 VPS to Modal or Vercel Sandbox.
Self-hosted gateway putting an agent in Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, Discord and iMessage at once.
One Gateway process fans out to every channel plugin. Needs Node 22.22.3+ (26 recommended); the installer provisions it.
| Hermes Agent | OpenClaw | |
|---|---|---|
| Licence | Open source | Open source |
| Pricing | open source | open source |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Languages | Any language | Any language |
| Install | curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash | curl -fsSL https://openclaw.ai/install.sh | bash |
| Keys required | None | None |
Both are open source harness options with comparable terms, so the choice comes down to which model of the problem you prefer — compare the descriptions below rather than the licence. Hermes Agent: Self-improving agent from Nous Research — writes its own skills from experience and carries them forward. OpenClaw: Self-hosted gateway putting an agent in Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, Discord and iMessage at once.
Hermes Agent can run on your own infrastructure. OpenClaw can run on your own infrastructure.
Hermes Agent is open source (open source). OpenClaw is open source (open source).
Every page here answers to Accept: text/markdown and returns the same content at roughly a tenth the tokens. No separate site, no toggle — same URL.
curl -s -H "Accept: text/markdown" https://newagent.build/compare/hermes-agent-vs-openclaw