I Tested OpenClaw, Odysseus & Hermes — Here's Which to Actually Use

0:00 Openclaw versus Odysseus versus Hermes. These are the three biggest names in self-hosted AI right now, and a lot of people compare them like you're supposed to pick a winner. But here is what almost every comparison gets wrong. These three are not actually built for the same job. They are three different kinds of tools, and the real mistake is not picking the worst one, it's picking the wrong type for what you actually need. So, in this video, I'm going to clear that up for you completely, what each one actually is, where it genuinely wins, and the security stuff that you really need to know before you run any of them. I will help you pick exactly what you need based on what you're trying to do. That way you can avoid wasting a weekend setting up something that was never going to do what you wanted. So, let's go ahead and get right into it. Let's start with the biggest name out there because Openclaw is the one that actually kicked off all of this. Openclaw is a self-hosted AI agent built around messaging. You deploy it, connect it to Telegram, Discord, WhatsApp, Slack, or any other application, and from then on, you've got an AI assistant that you text like a normal person. One that can actually do things for you like managing your calendar, running tasks, browsing the web, handling your email, all from a chat that you've already been using. And it is pretty massive. It became one of the fastest-growing open-source AI projects anyone has ever seen, crossing hundreds of thousands of GitHub stars in just a few months with a far bigger public footprint than the other two tools in this comparison. This also means that it's got the biggest community by far, and what's probably the largest community skill ecosystem of the three with thousands of add-ons that you can plug in. Essentially, if you want an always-on assistant that you can message from anywhere, that anyone on your team could talk to with the biggest library of add-ons in the space. Next up, we've got Odysseus, the all-in-one private workspace. Now, where Openclaw lives in your messages, Odysseus does the opposite. It gives you one place to go and actually get work done. It's probably the tool that brought you to this channel in the first place. Now, what it is here is a self-hosted AI workspace from Peter Pi's project.

2:02 Instead of living in your messages, it's one clean dashboard that you open on your own machine, and it bundles everything into that singular window. Chat, deep research, a document editor, notes, tasks, a calendar, email, model comparison, and more. You plug in whatever model that you want, local or cloud, and work inside it. It went viral the moment it launched, pulling in tens of thousands of GitHub stars within its first couple of days. To picture it in action, you research a topic with deep research, turn that into a written document, save the key points as notes, spin off a task or two, and keep all of it in one workspace that is private and you fully own. No copy-pasting between five different applications, and that's the workspace advantage in one sentence.

2:47 And third, we've got Hermes. And this is the one that most people have not fully wrapped their heads around yet, because it does something genuinely different from the other two. Hermes is a self-improving AI agent built by a respected research lab called News Research. Now, like Open Claw, it runs in the background, connects to your messaging applications, and does tasks on its own. But the defining feature is the learning loop. As I mentioned, it's a self-improving AI agent. When it finishes a complex task, it goes into what News calls a reflective phase. It analyzes how it did, extracts what worked, and writes itself a reusable skill file. So, unlike a normal agent that treats every task as brand new, Hermes actually gets better as your recurring work the more that you use it.

3:31 It's grown incredibly fast on the strength of that idea, well over 100,000 GitHub stars in a matter of weeks. Here is what that looks like in practice. You tell it to check a project every morning, summarize what changed overnight, and message you the rundown. And then over time, it saves the whole routine as a skill and gets faster and sharper at running it. That compounding is the entire pitch. On top of that, Hermes has an opt-in checkpoint system that can snapshot your entire project before destructive operations. So, if something goes wrong, you can roll back to the previous state. That is incredible, a genuine safety net that the others have not built it the same way yet. All right, so now that we know a little bit more about each one of them, let's go ahead and talk about the most important part, and that is the security one. Now, in my opinion, this matters more than any other feature because all three of them can run code and touch your real accounts and files.

4:24 That is pretty much what an AI agent is capable of, especially if you run it on your own machine. So, before you install anything, let's go ahead and sort this out. I'm going to be completely honest about Open Claw first because it's the biggest and the most exposed one. Its security stories are genuinely serious. Because it grew so fast and was built to be easy, huge numbers of people ended up running it on public servers with open ports. The results were well documented. A one-click remote code execution vulnerability, security audits finding hundreds of malicious skills in its community marketplace, roughly one in eight or nine at one point, and security teams identifying tens of thousands of Open Claw instances publicly exposed across the internet.

5:05 Major security firms publicly advised against running it on your own main work machine. None of this means that Open Claw is unusable. The team has shipped real fixes, mandatory authentication, and sandboxing options since then. But, it does mean that you have to set it up carefully and never just expose it to the open internet. Now, Hermes, on the other hand, being newer, has had far fewer reported incidents. But, the honest read is that it's partly because it's had less exposure and battle testing, not proof that it's bulletproof. On paper, it has the strongest documented safety model out of the three with things like dangerous command approvals, container isolation, and that opt-in checkpoint system. Good defaults, but newer. And finally, Odysseus because it's a single user local workspace rather than an always-on agent sitting on your server, it has a smaller attack surface by nature. But the same rule applies and its own developers say directly, keep authentication on, don't expose its port to the public internet, and be careful with the agent's access to your machine.

6:07 So here is the universal checklist and it's true for all three of them to keep you safe. The first one is to keep authentication on, start with narrow permissions, and keep approval prompts on for anything risky. Audit any third-party add-ons before installing them, and never throw any of these open to the public internet. The hardest part of self-hosted AI was never the AI. It's actually running it safely. Treat these as powerful tools that you supervise, not magic boxes that you set loose, and you will be fine. All right, so that security reality is exactly why category matters so much here. So let's put all three side-by-side. I'm going to compare them quickly head-to-head and who wins at what. If you want the easiest to start with and the best for beginners, Odysseus clearly wins. You open your command prompt, you write a few lines, and then you open it in your browser and go. The best interface and the best all-in-one workspace, Odysseus again. Nothing else is as polished or as complete in one window. If you want the biggest community, most integrations, and most skills, Open Claw and by a mile. It's the largest ecosystem in the space. If you want the best messaging-based that reaches you anywhere, Open Claw wins once again. That's its entire reason for existing. But if you want the most powerful agent that's the best at learning and getting better over time, Hermes wins. The self-improving loop is unique to it. And then the best built-in safety nets for file tasks, Hermes with its opt-in checkpoint and rollback. And finally, the best for genuine privacy on your own hardware, any of them can run fully locally, but Odysseus's single-user local design makes it the simplest to keep trolley parva. In conclusion, the best for most normal people watching this, Odysseus first.

7:50 It's the gentlest on ramp, and you can always add an agent later. So, which one should you actually run? Here is the straight answer, and it comes back to that one question from the start. What is the main thing that you actually want? If the main thing that you want is a workspace to chat, research, documents, add your notes, models, and more, all of them fully in one dashboard that you sit down and use, you clearly want to run Odysseus. It's the easiest to start, and for most people watching this, it's the one to begin with. If the main thing that you want is reach an assistant that you can message from Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, or whatever that you talk with, you want to run Open Claw with the biggest ecosystem in the space, as long as you're willing to set it up carefully and securely. And finally, if you want a super long-term agent that continues to learn with you, something that runs tasks, builds reusable skills, and gets better around your recurring workflows, then Hermes is the best here. Now, the final part that most comparisons might skip, it's the setup that I would actually recommend for most people. The truth is, you don't have to pick just one, and the best combo is not Open Claw. In my opinion, it's best to run Odysseus and Hermes together. Here is exactly why and how I would run it. You want to run Odysseus locally on your own machine as your workspace. It's the thing that you open when you want to sit down to actually work, research, writing, documents, organizing your day.

9:15 And since it's local, it's private and free. And it only needs to be on while you're using it. And then you can run Hermes as your always-on agent in the background. You use it for autonomous work it's best at, the learning loop, the scheduled tasks, the stuff that should keep happening while you're away from your computer. And because Hermes needs to be on 24/7 to do that, you want to host it on a cheap server like a Hostinger VPS. That way it's always running and always reachable even when your laptop's closed. Your workspace for actual work is local and private, and your agent is hosted and always on. That is the cleanest split there is. The way I normally use them is that Hermes is on my VPS running every morning routine.

9:59 Every day it checks the news in my field, monitors my projects, and messages a summary. It learns and gets sharper over time at those tasks specifically. And then when I want to do a deep work session, I open Odysseus on my PC and then do some focused work. I take what Hermes surfaced, research deeper, write it up in a document, organize it into notes and tasks. The agent handles the always-on background and the workspace handles the hands-on.

10:25 They cover the two halves of how I actually want to work. So, with that said, the real takeaway is the framework, not my exact stack. The mistake was always treating this like a winner-takes-all fight, but it never was. You want to decide whether you want a workspace, a learning agent, or a messaging assistant. Match the tool to that or combine them like I just laid out. Do that, and you have made the right call. Thanks so much for watching this video. If this has finally made these three click for you, do me a favor and hit the subscribe button. I'll be building out full setup guides on all of this, including how to get Hermes running on a VPS with real workflows and use cases. You for sure don't want to miss out on all of that. And if you found this video to be useful, make sure to like it so I know, and see you guys in the next video.