What you can do with Hermes Agent, and the open-source Kortix version for a team
People run Hermes Agent as an always-on personal assistant: it lives on a cheap VPS, reaches them from Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp or the CLI, and turns repeated tasks into reusable skills. Kortix, the open-source AI Operating System, turns the same idea into shared work a whole team reviews.
The work an agent hands back
kortix sessions new --prompt "Add a skill that drafts the weekly status report"kortix cr lskortix cr diff 1kortix cr merge 1A session's output arrives as a change request a person reviews.
What people run a personal agent for
Hermes Agent is an open-source personal agent built by Nous Research. Its website describes the shape: you install it on your server, give it your messaging accounts, and reach it from Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal or the CLI. It keeps persistent memory of your preferences and projects, writes a reusable skill when it solves a hard problem, and runs scheduled jobs that deliver to whatever platform you use. What Hermes Agent is covers the design in more detail.
How the work changes for a whole team
When several people run one agent, the questions change from what it can do to who may do what. Hermes documents per-person authorization and per-user sessions, and each Bot in Bot Mode has its own role, model, memory and skills. What it does not provide is a shared project a team reviews: the config and memory stay on the machine that runs the agent, and there is no permission per tool per person. Kortix answers the team side. Agents, skills, memory and connectors live as files in a git repo the company owns, people and agents get per-resource permissions, each session runs in its own sandbox on its own branch, and what an agent produces lands through a change request a person merges. Running Hermes for a team walks through the difference.
Jobs a team hands to agents
The same agent that remembers one person's projects can run a team's recurring work. On Kortix, agents run on their own cloud computers and return finished deliverables: an outbound campaign with the send step held for approval, a morning sweep that fixes the worst error and opens a change request, a weekly report, or a reconciliation that explains the variance. Each lands as something a person reads and approves, not a chat reply. The other open-source options sit at different points on the same line, and what each one costs is mostly the model and the compute.
One operator or a whole team
Kortix first, then Hermes Agent, each fact from its own documentation.
| Option | Open source | Intended user | Where it runs | Reach (channels) | What it learns and keeps | Team roles and review | Self-hosting |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kortixsource https://kortix.com/docs | Yes. Read it, fork it, audit it. | Teams and companies that review the work. | Kortix Cloud, your VPC, or on-prem; a sandbox per session. | Web, desktop, mobile, CLI, Slack and Microsoft Teams; email experimental. | Skills and company memory as files in the git repo, versioned. | Per-resource permissions; work lands through a change request a person merges. | Self-host is free; one Docker Compose stack, or on-prem. |
| Hermes Agentsource https://www.hermes-agent.org | Yes; the source is on GitHub. | One operator's always-on personal agent. | A $5 VPS, a GPU cluster, or serverless infrastructure. | Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, the CLI and more. | MEMORY.md and USER.md notes and agent-created skills. | One gateway with allowlists; named Bots run in group chats. | Self-hosted on your own server; runs on a $5 VPS. |
Hermes Agent use questions
- Is Hermes only for personal use?
- Hermes is built and documented for one operator, though one gateway can serve several people. It keeps config, memory and skills on the machine that runs it.
- Can it work across messaging apps?
- Yes. One gateway reaches Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, the CLI and more, with per-person authorization.
- What changes when a team runs it?
- A team needs shared projects, roles, a permission per tool, and a review step. Kortix adds each of those, plus an isolated sandbox per session and a change request a person merges.
- Can we try Kortix next to Hermes?
- Yes. Keep Hermes for one person and run Kortix for the team. Kortix installs with one command and self-hosts free; any model works with your own keys.
Put the agent's work where a whole team can review it.
Start free in the cloud, or self-host with your own keys.
Open source · Any model, your keys · Self-host, VPC, or on-prem