Grok Bot vs Hermes Agent: which to use
Grok Bot has no free tier and comes bundled into SuperGrok or Cursor subscriptions running $20 to roughly $300 a month, with its own cloud computer doing the work. Hermes Agent is free and open source, self-hosted on your own machine, with an optional paid Nous Portal subscription only if you want 300-plus hosted models through one bill instead of your own API keys.
Last verified 29 September 2026.
Grok Bot vs Hermes, side by side
| Fact | Grok Bot | Hermes Agent |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | xAI (SpaceXAI) source | Nous Research (venture-funded; TechCrunch reported a $75M round at a $1.5B valuation, July 2026) source |
| Launch date | Early beta 11 August 2026; expanded to more plans 21 and 26 August 2026; "Team Bots" (shared agents for a team) launched around 28 September 2026 source | Repository created 22 July 2025; public launch "since February 2026" per its own star-growth framing (64K+ stars since Feb 2026 launch, 247,436 stars by 20 September 2026) source |
| Price and plans | No standalone Grok Bot price. Bundled into SuperGrok ($30/mo), SuperGrok Plus ($100/mo, reported), SuperGrok Heavy ($300/mo, reported, xAI's own pricing pages return HTTP 403 to automated checks), Cursor Pro ($20/mo), Cursor Pro+ ($60/mo), Cursor Ultra ($200/mo), and Cursor Teams Standard/Premium ($40 / ~$120 per seat). Each eligible plan gets a weekly Grok Bot usage allowance (size unpublished); heavier use bills on demand. source | Free and open source (MIT license) to self-host with your own model API keys. A Nous Portal subscription (for 300+ bundled models plus a Tool Gateway) is reported at Free/$20/$100/$200 per month tiers, triangulated from third-party SEO pages and TechCrunch's reported $20-$200/mo range; the official pricing page itself returned HTTP 429 to automated checks in this and the prior pass, so exact tier names and credit amounts are UNVERIFIED against the primary source. Separate Business and Enterprise tiers exist (contact sales). source |
| Availability | By plan: SuperGrok Plus, SuperGrok Heavy, Cursor Pro+, Cursor Ultra, and Cursor Teams Standard or Premium. source | Global; self-hosted, open source, no account required for the core agent (an anonymous/free-tier auth path exists for those who do want hosted models). source |
| Platforms | Grok app (desktop, iOS), and via a required Cursor account for the Cursor-bundled routes. Team Bots reachable in Slack or the Grok Bot interface. source | macOS, Linux, Windows; a desktop app; 22+ first-party messaging-platform plugins (Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Matrix, LINE, Feishu, Teams and more) plus generic webhook/API-server ingress. source |
| Underlying model | Grok 4.6 ("Same 1.5T base as 4.5", per third-party aggregation; API priced at $2 input / $6 output per million tokens) source | Model-agnostic via the Nous Portal: 300+ models including Anthropic Claude, OpenAI GPT, Google Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, GLM, MiniMax, Grok, and others; or local models via Ollama/llama.cpp, subject to a minimum-context-length floor that can reject small local models by default. source |
| Where memory lives | On xAI's cloud: a Bot keeps preferences, role context and summaries of prior work, and your Bots share one cloud computer for files and browser sessions. source | Two local files, MEMORY.md (2,200-character budget) and USER.md (1,375-character budget), on the user's own machine under ~/.hermes/. Injected as a frozen snapshot at session start; the tool has no read action, and by its own design has no source-session lineage or deletion tombstone on entries (per a competitor's technical comparison). source |
| Always on | Yes. "Persistent agents on a shared computer" that keep working after you stop looking; the distinguishing line used against it: "Grok thinks, Bot acts." source | Not by default; a full cron/scheduler subsystem exists for unattended, scheduled jobs when self-hosted continuously, including a script-only wake-gate mode with no LLM call. source |
| Own computer / browser | Yes. Described consistently across sources as having its own cloud computer; got browser-based App Store submission automation as a demoed capability. source | No. Runs on the user's own hardware (self-hosted, like OpenClaw), with an optional cloud terminal sandbox (Modal) available through the Tool Gateway rather than a dedicated always-on cloud computer of its own. source |
| Integrations | Team Bots: "Give your Team Bot the skills, plugins, and credentials it needs for its role." Individual Grok Bot: app/plugin ecosystem not itemized in sources found beyond the App Store automation example. source | MCP; the Nous Portal Tool Gateway (Firecrawl web search/extract, FAL image generation, OpenAI TTS, Browser Use cloud browser automation, Modal cloud sandbox); autonomous skill authoring (skill_manage) and a background skill-consolidation "Curator". source |
| Trains on your data by default | Follows your Cursor account and privacy settings, and Grok Bot needs cloud data storage (Cursor's Legacy Privacy Mode is not supported). source | No. Hermes collects no telemetry, usage data or analytics; conversations, memory and skills stay in ~/.hermes/ and model calls go only to the provider you configure. source |
Each of the 22 cells in this table links to its source. A row is left out when no source answers it for every product shown.
Who should pick which?
Pick Grok Bot if…
Pick Grok Bot if you already pay for SuperGrok or a qualifying Cursor plan and want an agent with its own always-on cloud computer, plus Team Bots for sharing skills, plugins and credentials across a team from Slack.
Pick Hermes if…
Pick Hermes if you'd rather not pay a bundled subscription at all: it's free and open source under the MIT license, runs on your own API keys, and adds autonomous skill-writing (drafting and filing new skills for itself roughly every 10 tool-call iterations) that Grok Bot doesn't document having.
Skip both if…
Grok Bot is not for anyone who wants a free agent, since it has no free tier. Hermes is not for anyone who wants zero setup, since it asks you to install and configure it yourself.
What do users say?
“My issue with Muse and Instinct is i'm not constantly booking flights or making reservations (thought they're great at that). I struggle to figure out what to use it for daily even though I want to.”
@hassaanraza (on the personal-agent category broadly, quoted here for the Grok Bot comparison context), Grok Bot
“The idea is cool. I like Grok Bot, however, the issue is limits are very low, the Mac app is full of bugs, and the model is way far behind Claude or CGPT. I guess the new 'Dots' agents, as they call it, by OpenAI would surpass it easily.”
@ItsMOK__, Grok Bot
“This is great but please increase usage limits for grok bot! I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only one who wants this!”
@betmontdev, Grok Bot
“wait so team bot is me and my 12 bots, or my team and their bots? asking bc my bots already outnumber my humans”
@Chalam_PVS, Grok Bot
“I've been looking for a new cooker. I have a Hermes agent running on VM that does this. I told it to keep an eye on prices. It created a cron job that tri[ggers]...”
cassianoleal, Hacker News, Hermes Agent
“IMO this comes down to your harness. Any frontier model from a huge shop has an inherent benefit in the system you're using it in... I recommend trying Hermes Agent and setting it up fully, that's the closest you'll get to a more complete experience.”
wronglebowski, Hacker News, Hermes Agent
“I also run Hermes Agent and have set up there one agent to be responsible for the KB stuff and that one I connected to a Matrix channel and can use it from the phone and any device where I have a matrix client like Element set up.”
jeena, Hacker News, Hermes Agent
“The local model forgot things without saying so. Every model can hold only a limited amount of text at once, its context window, and in long conversations the local model was silently dropping the beginning.”
Marc Bara, Medium, Hermes Agent
Common questions
Is Hermes really free where Grok Bot isn't?
Yes, at the core. Hermes's agent software is free and open source (MIT license); you pay only your own model provider's bill. Grok Bot has no standalone price at all; you reach it only through an eligible SuperGrok or Cursor subscription.
Can Hermes use Grok's own models?
Yes. Hermes is model-agnostic through the Nous Portal, which lists Grok among 300-plus available models, alongside Claude, GPT, Gemini and others.
Does either one write its own skills or automations?
Hermes does, documented: roughly every 10 tool-call iterations it forks a background process that can draft or patch a skill file automatically. No equivalent autonomous skill-writing was found documented for Grok Bot.
Which one is self-hosted?
Hermes is, by design: it runs on your own machine or server, with an optional cloud sandbox available through its Tool Gateway. Grok Bot runs on xAI's own cloud computer as part of your subscription; there's no self-hosted version of it.
Neither one fits? Each agent has its own alternatives page, with every fact linked to its source. Or Mover OS, $49 once. It is the wrong choice if you want something that keeps running while your computer is off.