Hermes Agentvs Muse

Muse is Meta's personal AI agent. Meta gives each Muse its own cloud computer, the Muse Secure VM: a persistent, isolated Linux computer with a browser that you and the agent share. Muse is for adults 18 and over with a Meta account, and Meta says Muse and its subscriptions are still in limited testing and not available in all locations.

Hermes Agent runs wherever you install it: your computer, a server or a VPS. Hermes Desktop runs on macOS (Apple Silicon), Windows and Linux. Its shell commands can run locally, in a Docker container, over SSH, or in Modal, Daytona or Vercel Sandbox.

If you do not want to keep a machine on, Hermes Cloud hosts your agent on a dedicated, always-on instance in the nearest available region. Every paid Nous Portal plan includes one Hermes Cloud agent; larger or extra agents bill daily from credits. Hermes Desktop can connect to that agent and to agents on your own machines, side by side.

Hermes Agent works with any OpenAI-compatible API. One Nous Portal login covers hundreds of models and hosted tools, and the provider list includes OpenRouter and dozens of others. A ChatGPT sign-in goes through the Codex provider and uses Codex models. Local models run through Ollama, vLLM, llama.cpp or SGLang with no account.

Meta's Muse Spark models work too, through the Meta Model API provider and your own Meta Model API key. The model you pick is the model that answers: /model switches mid-session, your conversation history, memory and skills carry over, and backup providers are opt-in.

Muse runs on Meta's own models. On October 21, 2026, Meta's CEO said Muse Spark is the default on the free tier and that paid subscribers can use Meta's newer Muse Wonder model. Meta documents no way to pick another company's model or use your own API key in Muse, and it counts usage in Muse tokens at rates it sets.

Hermes Agent stores conversations, memory and skills in the Hermes home directory on the machine that runs it (~/.hermes on macOS and Linux). Model requests go only to the providers you configure. Hermes Agent collects no telemetry by default; usage-metrics sharing is opt-in, and those metrics leave out prompts and responses.

An encrypted vault on your machine fills saved logins and cards without the model seeing them, and it asks you before every card fill. The vault works with 1Password and Bitwarden.

Muse keeps your data on its Meta-hosted cloud computer. Meta says Muse keeps your conversations and that computer's data out of its ad systems. Meta limits staff access by policy but says its current design does not prevent it from accessing data when necessary to support, secure or operate the service. Meta plans a Confidential VM for later in 2026.

Through one gateway, Hermes Agent connects to more than 20 messaging platforms, including Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage through BlueBubbles, Microsoft Teams, LINE and email. Scheduled jobs can post their results to those chats. The CLI, Desktop, bots and scheduled jobs share one gateway, so a conversation continues wherever you pick it up.

A Hermes Agent mobile app is in beta and coming soon. Today you message it from your phone through a chat app, or use Hermes Desktop in your phone's browser with the Webapp.

Meta lists the Muse app, WhatsApp, the web and the Mac app as the ways to reach Muse. WhatsApp works once you link your WhatsApp account, and Muse sees only its own chat there.

Hermes Agent can hand parts of a task to subagents, each with its own context and terminal session, and it runs up to 10 at once by default. Profiles let you run several independent agents on one machine, each with its own memory, skills and API keys.

In Hermes Desktop, Bot Mode gives each Bot its own role, model, memory and skills. Bots run recurring routines, work together in group chats of 2 to 6, and message each other directly.

Muse is a personal agent with a main chat and side chats. It starts subagents internally, and Meta documents no agent teams you set up.

Hermes Agent is open source under the MIT license, which allows commercial use, and the code is on GitHub. Its skills are compatible with the agentskills.io open standard, and you can share the skills it writes or install community skills from the Skills Hub.

Muse is closed source. Meta keeps all rights in it, and the Muse terms forbid reverse engineering it. In October 2026 Meta released open weights for Muse Spark Open, a version of its Muse Spark model, under the Muse Model License, which has limited commercial terms.