AI tool comparison
Hermes Agent vs Make
Which one should you ship with? Here is the side-by-side panel verdict, pricing read, reviewer split, and community vote comparison.
AI Agents
Hermes Agent
Self-improving AI agent from Nous Research that grows over time
75%
Panel ship
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Community
Free
Entry
Hermes Agent is an open-source, self-improving AI agent from Nous Research that learns from every task it completes. Unlike stateless assistants, Hermes maintains persistent memory across sessions using full-text search and LLM-powered summarization, autonomously creating and refining skills as it works. The agent runs everywhere — from a $5 VPS to GPU clusters or serverless platforms like Daytona and Modal that hibernate when idle. It ships with 40+ built-in tools and integrates with MCP servers, while supporting any model via Nous Portal, OpenRouter, OpenAI, or Anthropic endpoints with instant switching. What makes Hermes distinctive is its multi-platform gateway: one agent accessible via CLI, Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, or email — all sharing the same memory and skill base. With 23k GitHub stars and 9k new this week, it's one of the fastest-rising agentic frameworks in the ecosystem.
Automation
Make
Visual automation platform — like Zapier but more powerful
100%
Panel ship
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Community
Free
Entry
Make (formerly Integromat) is a visual automation platform with drag-and-drop workflow building. More powerful than Zapier for complex scenarios with branching, loops, and data transformation. 1,800+ app integrations.
Reviewer scorecard
“The skill persistence is the killer feature here — most agents lose everything between sessions, Hermes actually compounds. Running it on a $5 VPS with serverless fallback is a clever cost model, and the cross-platform gateway means your agent is wherever you are.”
“More powerful than Zapier for complex workflows — branching, loops, error handling. The visual builder makes complex logic readable. Great for non-trivial automation.”
“Self-improving AI that autonomously creates and refines its own skills sounds impressive until you read about the debugging nightmare when those skills go wrong. Nous Research hasn't published rigorous evals on skill quality, and 'grows with you' is marketing until there's reproducible benchmarking.”
“Steeper learning curve than Zapier but the ceiling is much higher. If your automation needs are simple, Zapier is easier. If they're complex, Make is better.”
“Hermes is an early glimpse of what personal AI infrastructure looks like — not a chat window, but a persistent agent that accumulates organizational memory. This model of AI-as-colleague rather than AI-as-tool is where the industry is heading.”
“The idea that my agent learns my creative workflow over time and gets smarter about it is genuinely exciting. The multi-platform access means I can ping it from wherever inspiration strikes without context switching.”
“I use Make for my content pipeline — new blog post triggers social media scheduling, newsletter draft, and analytics tracking. Visual builder makes it manageable.”
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