Comparison
Orion vs Hermes Agent
Side by side
Everything in the Hermes Agent column is taken from their own public pages as of October 2026. Products change; check theirs before you decide. Where they publish nothing about something, this says so rather than guessing.
| Orion | Hermes Agent | |
|---|---|---|
| One daily brief across every source | Yes — one page at 6am, synthesized from email, calendar, finance, health, code and notes | Not built in — its scheduler can run any prompt on a schedule and deliver the result to a chat app, so you can build one |
| Two-way SMS (text it, it answers and acts) | Yes — US numbers, opt-in, verified by code, reply STOP to end | Yes, with your own Twilio number and a public webhook you host |
| Personal wiki with unified memory | Yes — pages for people, projects and topics that grow every night from your calendar and email, woven into every brief. You can read, edit and undo all of it | Two plain-text memory files — notes up to 2,200 characters and a user profile up to 1,375 — plus search of past sessions |
| Semantic search over your own history | Yes — across every past brief, wiki page and message, by meaning | Full-text search of past sessions |
| Health and fitness data in the brief | Yes — Oura, Garmin, Withings, Strava: sleep, readiness, HRV, activity | Not published — check their site |
| Finance in the brief | Yes — Plaid, YNAB, Splitwise: balances, budget, unusual activity | Not published — check their site |
| Developer sources | Yes — GitHub and Linear: what moved, what is blocked on you | Yes — any MCP server or skill, and code runs locally, in Docker, over SSH or in cloud sandboxes |
| Pricing | $20 a month, or $192 a year — one plan, everything included, with a 14-day free trial | Free and open source (MIT). Hosted instances on Nous Portal, with plans from $0 to $200 a month in credits plus compute |
| Compliance certifications | None yet, stated plainly on the security page. AES-256-GCM encrypted tokens, TLS, per-user isolation in the database | Not published — check their site |
| Asks before it acts | Yes — anything that leaves your account waits for your OK, on the web or by texting back a code. Every change is logged with an Undo | For shell commands: a second model approves low-risk ones, dangerous ones are blocked or ask you. Other actions are up to the skills you install |
| Your data used to train AI | No — never used to train general AI models, never sold, never used for advertising | Uses the model provider you configure; that provider's terms apply |
| Books, buys and calls for you | No — Orion finds products on Shopify stores and hands you a checkout link. It does not book travel, pay, or phone businesses | Not published — check their site |
| Where you reach it | Web app with push notifications, two-way SMS on US numbers, and the brief by email. No WhatsApp, voice or native app yet | Terminal, Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal and email |
| Setup | Sign in with Google and click through the connections you want | You install and run it yourself, with your own API keys and your own Google Cloud login for Gmail |
When Hermes Agent is the better choice
If you are technical and want an agent on your own machine, with any model, any chat app and skills it writes for itself, Hermes is free, open source and far more customisable than Orion. If you would rather sign in and have it work tomorrow morning, that is Orion.
What Orion is for
One person's whole life in one place: email, calendar, finances, health, side projects and notes, read overnight and synthesized into a single morning brief. You can text it a question and it answers from your actual data — and it acts, drafting the reply, booking the event, closing the task. It is not a team workspace, and it is not trying to become one.
The details are on the homepage, and how it handles your data is on the security page. Orion is in private beta; join the waitlist and you are let in roughly in order.