goose vs Hermes Agent
Price, platforms and features side by side. The table says where each price was read and when.
Hermes Agent
Open-source AI agent with persistent memory and a messaging gateway
Where they differ
- goose is free. Hermes Agent starts at $20 per month for the optional Nous Portal Plus tier; the agent is free.
- Only Hermes Agent lists a web app.
- Hermes Agent is self-hostable, according to its own site.
- Hermes Agent also covers chat assistant.
At a glance
| goose | Hermes Agent | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Free | Free plan |
| Starts at | Free | $20 per month for the optional Nous Portal Plus tier; the agent is free |
| Free plan | Goose is free and open source under the Apache 2.0 license, with no paid plan. Model usage is billed by the provider you connect, unless you run a local model or use a provider's free tier. | Hermes Agent is free and open source under the MIT license. You connect your own model provider, or a free Nous Portal account that is limited to free models. |
| Free trial | None listed | None listed |
| Web | ||
| macOS | ||
| Windows | ||
| Linux | ||
| Made by | Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) | Nous Research, Inc. |
| Price read from | goose-docs.ai | hermes-agent.nousresearch.com |
| Checked | Oct 9, 2026 | Oct 5, 2026 |
Who each one suits
goose
- Developers who want a local agent for coding and terminal work
- People who want to reuse a Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini subscription they already pay for
- Teams that share repeatable workflows as recipes
Hermes Agent
- Developers who want an agent on their own machine, server or VPS
- Reaching one agent from Telegram, Discord, Slack or WhatsApp
- Unattended scheduled jobs such as reports and briefings
Worth knowing
goose
- goose is free, but hosted models are billed by the provider you connect, and the docs note that not every provider has a free tier.
- It runs on your own machine: there are desktop apps for macOS, Linux and Windows and a CLI, and the site lists no hosted cloud version.
- The docs say goose relies heavily on tool calling and currently works best with Claude 4 models.
- The project left Block for the Agentic AI Foundation in April 2026; its repository moved from block/goose to aaif-goose/goose.
Hermes Agent
- The agent is free, but paid models cost extra: your own provider's rates, or Nous Portal tiers from $20 a month.
- Desktop apps are offered for macOS and Windows; on Linux the install is through the terminal.
- The platform support page lists no iOS version, and Android runs only through a prerelease Termux package.
- Hermes Cloud needs $2 of Nous credit or an active subscription to deploy, and bills inference separately from the instance.
Key features
goose
- Desktop app, CLI and API
- The same agent runs in a native desktop app, a terminal CLI and an API for embedding. The desktop app and CLI share provider, model and extension settings.
- MCP extensions
- More than 70 documented extensions connect goose to databases, APIs, browsers, GitHub, Google Drive and other tools through the Model Context Protocol, and you can build your own.
- Providers and existing subscriptions
- Works with 15+ providers, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Ollama, OpenRouter, Azure and Bedrock, or with a Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini subscription you already have, through ACP.
- Built-in local inference
- The desktop app can download a GGUF model from Hugging Face and run it in-process with llama.cpp, with no API key and no separate model server.
- Recipes
- Workflows are saved as portable YAML recipes holding instructions, extensions, parameters and subrecipes, then shared with a team or run in CI.
- Subagents and safety controls
- Subagents handle parallel tasks outside the main conversation. Safeguards include prompt injection detection, tool permission controls, a sandbox mode and an adversary reviewer.
Hermes Agent
- Messaging gateway
- One gateway connects the agent to Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, Matrix, email, Microsoft Teams and other platforms, more than 20 in all, sharing a single memory.
- Memory and self-written skills
- The agent keeps memory across sessions, creates reusable skills from work it has done and revises them in use. Skills follow the open agentskills.io format.
- Scheduled automations
- Built-in cron accepts natural-language schedules for reports, backups and briefings and delivers the results to any connected platform.
- Subagents
- Isolated subagents with their own conversations and terminals handle parallel workstreams without filling the main agent's context.
- Terminal backends and sandboxing
- Commands run locally or in Docker, over SSH, or on Daytona, Singularity, Modal or Vercel Sandbox, with command approval and container isolation.
- Nous Portal and Hermes Cloud
- A Portal subscription supplies credits for 200+ models and hosted web search, image generation, text-to-speech and browser tools. Hermes Cloud hosts an always-on agent, billed daily.
Plans
goose
goose (Apache 2.0)Free
The full desktop app, CLI and API. You bring a model provider, an existing AI subscription or a local model.
Hermes Agent
Hermes Agent$0
The complete MIT-licensed agent, run on your own machine or server with a model provider of your choice.
Nous Portal Free$0
Free models only, standard rate limits and no monthly credits.
Nous Portal Plus$20
per month
$22 of monthly credits (a 10% bonus) with a $10 rollover cap, 200+ models, hosted tool usage and high rate limits.
Nous Portal Super$100
per month
$110 of monthly credits with a $50 rollover cap, plus the same models, hosted tools and rate limits as Plus.
Nous Portal Ultra$200
per month
$220 of monthly credits with a $100 rollover cap, plus the same models, hosted tools and rate limits as Plus.
Hermes CloudFrom $0.56
per day while running, billed from Nous credit
Optional always-on hosting: Medium is $0.56 a day and Large $1.09 while running, $0.03 a day stopped. Inference and tool usage are billed separately.
