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

Hermes Agent vs Town

Hermes Agent scores 67.9 (B) on agent readiness against Town's 48.7 (D), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Both do proactive personal assistants.

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

Hermes AgentNous Research · Agent harness B67.9/100#244 of 1010 TownTown.com, Inc. · Platform D48.7/100#834 of 1010

Which one, for what

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 35
  • Schema & documentation, 80 against 33
  • Agent ergonomics, 80 against 49
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 30
  • Maintenance & community, 84 against 60

Also in its favour

  • No key needed to call it
  • 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

Town D

Best for An owner who wants a mail and calendar assistant whose routines other systems can trigger.

Also in its favour

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

Watch for

The privacy policy describes training with an opt-out and the trust page says training is opt-in.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runHermes AgentTownEdge
Reliability16%205735Hermes Agent +22
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28033Hermes Agent +47
Agent ergonomics13%16.28049Hermes Agent +31
Security & auth14%17.57579Town +4
Payments & pricing10%12.56030Hermes Agent +30
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88460Hermes Agent +24
Transparency & trust7%8.86363even
Negative events≤15-30
TotalB 67.9/100D 48.7/100

Facts side by side

FactHermes AgentTown
KindAgent harnessPlatform
VendorNous ResearchTown.com, Inc.
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
TransportsHTTP
AuthNoneOAuth or key
PricingFreeFreemium
x402nono
LicenceMITClosed service under Town's Terms of Service (Town.com, Inc., updated 21 July 2026).
Read-only variant documentednoyes
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-10-112026-10-10
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
Popularity253k starsnone

Verdicts

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.

Town

Town is a hosted assistant that works across the owner's mail, calendar and work apps, and other systems can start its routines through per-routine webhooks with rotatable secrets, idempotency keys and documented errors. A caller can't read a run's result. The privacy policy and trust page disagree on whether training is on by default.

Before you call either

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

Town

  1. Start a Town routine with POST to its webhook URL, Authorization Bearer whsec_ secret, and application/json or text/plain. Expect 202 only.
  2. Send X-Town-Idempotency-Key with a stable event id on every retry so Town doesn't start a second run.
  3. Treat 404 as wrong secret, disabled endpoint or missing endpoint alike, and ask the owner to check Routine Settings rather than retrying.
  4. Send account_email only if the owner allowed the override. It must match a connected account in full and can't widen the routine's scope.
  5. Ask the owner to keep routines that act on webhook input in approval-required mode, as Town's own docs advise.

Questions

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

Hermes Agent scores 67.9 (B) on agent readiness against Town's 48.7 (D), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories.

Are Hermes Agent and Town open source?

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

Other comparisons with Hermes Agent or Town

Disclosure

Town 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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