# 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.

URL: https://hermesalternative.com/hermes-agent-use-cases

## The work an agent hands back

`terminal`

```sh
kortix sessions new --prompt "Add a skill that drafts the weekly status report"
kortix cr ls
kortix cr diff 1
kortix cr merge 1
```

Source: https://kortix.com/docs/quickstart

A 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](https://www.hermes-agent.org) 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](/what-is-hermes-agent) 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](https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/user-guide/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](/kortix-vs-hermes) a person merges. [Running Hermes for a team](/hermes-for-teams) 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](/hermes-alternatives) sit at different points on the same line, and [what each one costs](/is-hermes-agent-free) is mostly the model and the compute.

## One operator or a whole team

Kortix first, then Hermes Agent, each fact from its own documentation.

| | Kortix (recommended) | Hermes Agent |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Open source | Yes. Read it, fork it, audit it. | Yes; the source is on GitHub. |
| Intended user | Teams and companies that review the work. | One operator's always-on personal agent. |
| Where it runs | Kortix Cloud, your VPC, or on-prem; a sandbox per session. | A $5 VPS, a GPU cluster, or serverless infrastructure. |
| Reach (channels) | Web, desktop, mobile, CLI, Slack and Microsoft Teams; email experimental. | Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, the CLI and more. |
| What it learns and keeps | Skills and company memory as files in the git repo, versioned. | MEMORY.md and USER.md notes and agent-created skills. |
| Team roles and review | Per-resource permissions; work lands through a change request a person merges. | One gateway with allowlists; named Bots run in group chats. |
| Self-hosting | Self-host is free; one Docker Compose stack, or on-prem. | 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.

[Try Kortix](https://kortix.com) · [Read the FAQ](https://hermesalternative.com/faq)

Open source · Any model, your keys · Self-host, VPC, or on-prem