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firstmate vs Hermes Agent

firstmate and Hermes Agent are free, MIT-licensed and can each run several agents at once, but they're for different work. firstmate is for software development: it's a folder of instructions and scripts that turns a coding agent you already use (Claude Code, Codex, Grok, Pi and others) into a coordinator that hands tasks to a crew, each in its own git worktree. Hermes Agent is a general personal assistant from Nous Research with its own memory, skills and chat-app access. If your problem is too many parallel coding tasks, look at firstmate; for an assistant that does a bit of everything, Hermes.

firstmate is a setup, not a program

There's no installer. You git clone the repo, cd into it and start a supported coding agent there; the repo itself is the "distro". It needs git and an authenticated GitHub CLI, and the badge lists macOS and Linux. Workers run in tmux by default (Herdr, cmux, Zellij and Orca are also supported), so you can attach and watch any of them, and each task gets a clean git worktree so parallel agents don't trample each other's changes. You pay for whichever coding agent subscription or API you run it on.

Hermes brings its own agent

Hermes is the agent itself. You install it with a script (Linux, macOS, WSL2), PowerShell on native Windows, or Termux on Android, then choose a model from Nous Portal, OpenRouter, OpenAI or your own endpoint. It keeps memories, searches past sessions, writes skills after hard tasks, runs cron jobs and can spawn subagents. You can message it on Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp or Signal, and its commands can run locally, in Docker, over SSH or in a cloud sandbox.

Can you use both

Not directly: Hermes isn't on firstmate's list of supported agents. In practice they sit side by side. firstmate drives coding work through Claude Code or Codex in your repo, and Hermes handles the scheduled, chat-driven jobs that have nothing to do with a codebase. Both projects are busy, with commits on 18 October 2026 for firstmate and a Hermes release on 15 October.

firstmate: Pick firstmate if you already use Claude Code, Codex or a similar coding agent and want it to split work across parallel worktrees you can watch in tmux.

Hermes Agent: Pick Hermes Agent if you want a standalone assistant with memory and scheduled jobs that you can reach from Telegram or Slack.

Facts checked Oct 18, 2026 against 5 sources

Which one should you try?

firstmate

Free

Best for Developers managing multiple simultaneous agent tasks

Visit firstmate See full review

Hermes Agent

Free

Best for People who want an assistant that remembers context across sessions

Visit Hermes Agent See full review

Pricing, capabilities and platforms side by side. Prices are as of the "Pricing checked" date in the table.

firstmate

firstmate

firstmate puts a single orchestrating agent — the 'first mate' — in front of you, while it spawns a crew of autonomous coding agents behind the scenes, each isolated in its own git worktree. You describe what needs doing; the crew splits the work in parallel and keeps collisions out of your main branch. The visible session backend means you can watch what each agent is doing without switching tabs. The architecture works cleanly for investigation tasks, parallel fixes, or supervised PR generation — the constraint is that there is no API surface, so anything requiring programmatic integration into an existing CI pipeline has to wire around the tool manually.

Hermes Agent

Hermes Agent

Hermes Agent from Nous Research keeps memory across sessions, saves reusable skills and can be reached through messaging apps. We ran it on three tasks with a local 3B model and with Claude Opus 5.5.

AttributefirstmateHermes Agent
PricingFreeFree
PriceFree (MIT); you pay for the coding agent it runs onFree (MIT, self-hosted)
Pricing checkedOct 19, 2026Jul 1, 2026
Free trialNot statedNot stated
Open sourceYesYes
Has APINoYes
Self-hosted optionYesYes
PlatformsmacOS, Linux; runs inside Claude Code, Codex, Grok, Pi, OpenCode or Cursor Agent CLI (tmux by default)macOS, Linux, Windows (native or WSL2), Android (Termux); runs commands locally or in Docker, SSH, Singularity, Modal, Daytona, Vercel Sandbox
Released—2026-02
Pros
  • Crew-based parallel dispatch, so three investigation or fix tasks run simultaneously instead of sequentially — cutting the wall-clock time you'd spend babysitting separate agent sessions.
  • Per-agent git worktree isolation, which means parallel agents working on adjacent code do not produce mid-run merge conflicts that you have to untangle before any output is usable.
  • Visible session backend for the whole crew, so you can monitor what each agent is doing without switching terminals or losing track of which session held the failing test.
  • Self-hosted under MIT license with no paid features gated behind a tier, so teams with data-residency or audit requirements can deploy it without a vendor conversation.
  • Supervised agent loops with PR or report output as the end state, which means you review finished work rather than raw agent traces — keeping you in the loop at the decision point that matters.
  • Memory and saved skills carry over between sessions.
  • Reach it from a CLI or messaging apps such as Telegram and Discord.
  • You choose where commands run, including Docker, SSH and hosted sandboxes.
  • Passed all 9 of our tasks with Claude Opus 5.5 and contacted only Anthropic's API while doing it.
Cons
  • No API surface exists in the architecture, so teams that need to trigger agent crews from a CI system or external scheduler have to build shell-level integrations against a tool not designed for that pattern — and maintain that glue code themselves.
  • The crew model requires a human interacting with the first mate agent as the starting point; fully unattended, scheduled agent runs with no human in the dispatch loop are not a supported workflow, which is the condition under which teams move to an orchestration framework that exposes a programmatic entry point.
  • Community support through GitHub issues is the primary support channel — with 29 open issues noted on the repo — so teams encountering edge-case failures in production have no escalation path beyond the open-source community.
  • Passed 0 of 9 tasks with a 3B local model; it needs a large model and a 64K context.
  • Heavy on tokens: an ~11,500-token prompt on every call and about 47,100 tokens per task, six times Goose's.
  • It installs its Anthropic support from PyPI on first use, so offline setups fail until you pre-install it.

Made up your mind?

firstmate

Free

Best for Developers managing multiple simultaneous agent tasks

Visit firstmate See full review

Hermes Agent

Free

Best for People who want an assistant that remembers context across sessions

Visit Hermes Agent See full review

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Specs come from each tool's own site and docs (how we test). AIDiveForge is editorially independent.

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