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Head to head · Proactive personal assistants · October 2026 research run

Caddy vs Hermes Agent

Hermes Agent scores 67.9 (B) on agent readiness against Caddy's 16.7 (F), and leads in every scored category. Both do proactive personal assistants.

Best AI personal assistants that act for one person · All 834 assistants comparisons

CaddyCaddy Technologies Inc. · Platform F16.7/100#996 of 1010 Hermes AgentNous Research · Agent harness B67.9/100#244 of 1010

Which one, for what

Caddy F

Best for People who want a free assistant in iMessage or RCS that watches mail, calendars and work tools and asks before acting.

Also in its favour

  • No incidents deducted, where Hermes Agent loses 3 points for them

Watch for

No API, MCP server or A2A endpoint for an outside agent.

Hermes Agent B

Best for A technical owner who wants one always-on agent across chat apps with memory and scheduled jobs, on their own machine or a small server, with any model.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 57 against 10
  • Schema & documentation, 80 against 10
  • Agent ergonomics, 80 against 0
  • Security & auth, 75 against 0
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 30
  • Maintenance & community, 84 against 55
  • Transparency & trust, 63 against 52

Also in its favour

  • No key needed to call it
  • Free to start without a card
  • Open source

Watch for

The default terminal backend runs commands on the host, and the default smart mode lets an auxiliary model approve commands it rates low-risk

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runCaddyHermes AgentEdge
Reliability16%201057Hermes Agent +47
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.21080Hermes Agent +70
Agent ergonomics13%16.2080Hermes Agent +80
Security & auth14%17.5075Hermes Agent +75
Payments & pricing10%12.53060Hermes Agent +30
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.85584Hermes Agent +29
Transparency & trust7%8.85263Hermes Agent +11
Negative events≤150-3
TotalF 16.7/100B 67.9/100

Facts side by side

FactCaddyHermes Agent
KindPlatformAgent harness
VendorCaddy Technologies Inc.Nous Research
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthOAuth or keyNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceClosed service under Caddy's Terms of Service (Caddy Technologies Inc., last updated 27 April 2026).MIT
Read-only variant documentedyesno
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-10-132026-10-11
Terms last updatedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linked
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Popularitynone253k stars

Verdicts

Caddy

Caddy is a free iMessage and RCS assistant in public beta that watches connected mail, calendars and work apps and asks before sending email or changing data. No outside agent can call it, and no status page, changelog or security contact was found, though its iOS app ships every week or two.

Hermes Agent

Card payments always ask first and are refused in unattended sessions, and the messaging gateway denies every sender until an allowlist is set. Shell commands run on the host by default with a model judging risk, and sending mail through the Google Workspace skill is held back only by an instruction to the model.

Before you call either

Caddy

  1. Don't plan to call Caddy from another agent. It answers the owner's text messages, Siri and group chats it's added to.
  2. Expect Caddy to ask the owner before it sends email or creates an invite.

Hermes Agent

  1. Set approvals.mode: manual before giving it real accounts. The default smart lets an auxiliary model approve commands
  2. Run the gateway with terminal.backend: docker or the project's Docker image when it reads mail, web pages or group chats
  3. Set memory.write_approval: true and skills.write_approval: true to review what it saves about the owner
  4. Leave approvals.cron_mode and approvals.unattended_mode at deny for scheduled and webhook runs
  5. Set TELEGRAM_ALLOWED_USERS or the matching allowlist per channel. Never set GATEWAY_ALLOW_ALL_USERS=true

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Caddy or Hermes Agent?

Hermes Agent scores 67.9 (B) on agent readiness against Caddy's 16.7 (F), and leads in every scored category.

Are Caddy and Hermes Agent open source?

No open-source release is listed for Caddy. Hermes Agent is open source (MIT).

Other comparisons with Caddy or Hermes Agent

Disclosure

Caddy competes with LocalGhost, which Anchor Terminal's founder builds. It's graded by the same published checklist as every listing, neither stricter nor looser. Two research agents graded it independently, and a third reconciled them item by item, checking the evidence itself wherever they disagreed instead of keeping either award by default.

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