Complete guide covering install (6 paths), real costs, hardware, security, and comparison vs OpenClaw/Cowork/CREAO/CrewAI.

The key differentiator: Hermes builds its own skills from experience and improves them autonomously. Most agents store your chats. Hermes creates reusable skill documents after complex tasks and updates them during use. The longer it runs the more capable it becomes.

22k GitHub stars, MIT license, 400+ model support including local via Ollama, built by the team behind the Hermes/Nomos/Psyche model families. $65M funded, 7 major releases in 5 weeks.

Built-in OpenClaw migration tool. Honcho dialectic user modeling (off by default, which is the biggest gotcha for new users). Gateway connects Telegram/Discord/Slack/WhatsApp/Signal from a single process.