Top 7 Hermes Orchestrators
Seven ways to run a team of Hermes agents, compared on what matters to the people who have to operate them.
Hermes Agent from Nous Research is one of the most popular open-source AI agents right now: it remembers what it learns, writes its own skills, runs scheduled jobs, and talks to you over Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp or Signal. Getting one Hermes running is easy. Running ten of them for different teammates, clients or jobs is a different problem entirely. Someone has to keep the agents apart, hand out API keys, take backups, control who can use what, and notice when an agent goes off the rails.
Nous ships a ready-made Hermes container, but nothing that manages a group of them. Out of the box each agent needs its own private copy of its data, your provider keys sit in a plain text file next to it, and its web dashboard and API are reachable over the network unless you lock them down. That last point is not theoretical. In June 2026, automated scanners found Hermes dashboards left open on the internet and tricked the agents into installing backdoors in their own settings. Nous put it down to misconfiguration, which is another way of saying that the tool around Hermes is what keeps you safe.
Below are the seven ways teams run Hermes at scale today, judged on the questions that matter to whoever has to operate them.
1. Claworc — the purpose-built Hermes orchestrator
Section titled “1. Claworc — the purpose-built Hermes orchestrator”Claworc is the only tool on this list built from day one to do exactly this job: run a team of AI agents with a few clicks and always know what they are doing. Hermes is the agent; Claworc is the place you run it from. And because Claworc treats the agent as swappable, OpenClaw and NanoClaw agents live on the same screen as your Hermes fleet.
Everything the other six options make you assemble by hand arrives here in one open-source package:
- Every agent in its own box. Each one gets a private workspace with its own browser, terminal, files and storage. Agents never see each other’s data.
- Nothing exposed to the internet. You reach every agent through one login-protected front door. No Hermes dashboard or API is ever open on the network, which closes the door the June 2026 attackers walked through.
- Your real API keys stay in Claworc. Each agent gets a stand-in key that you can cancel on its own, without touching the real one. Spending is tracked per agent and per provider. See how the LLM gateway works.
- 1,500+ ready-made connections. Plug a Hermes agent into Gmail, Notion, Google Ads, HubSpot, Jira and well over a thousand other systems with a few clicks through External Connections. You sign in once; the agent gets to use the service but never sees the password or token behind it.
- Backups you can actually use. Snapshot a workspace on demand or on a schedule, then restore it to any running agent with one click.
- Teammates see only their own agents. Admins manage everything; everyone else gets the workspaces assigned to them.
- Watch and steer any agent live. A real-time view of the agent’s browser, a live log, and a built-in chat mean non-technical users never need a terminal.
- Reusable skills. Package a prompt once as a skill and push it to any agent in one click.
It is fully open source and runs on a single Docker host or on Kubernetes. The quickstart guide gets a first fleet running in a few minutes.
2. NVIDIA NemoClaw
Section titled “2. NVIDIA NemoClaw”NemoClaw is the most popular project in this space, but it is a lockbox, not a fleet manager. It runs Hermes (or OpenClaw) inside a tightly sealed box that limits which files, programs and websites the agent can touch.
Good for: the strongest answer available to the question “what can this agent reach?” If you need to let one Hermes loose on sensitive work on one machine, NemoClaw is the reference.
Where it falls short: it manages one machine at a time and runs from the command line. There is no screen showing all your agents, no chat or live view, no per-teammate access, no workspace backups beyond scripts for saving skills, and it is still labelled alpha. You would need something above it to run many agents for many people.
3. OneCLI
Section titled “3. OneCLI”OneCLI started as a way to keep secrets away from agents and has grown into a team product: one sandboxed agent per employee, where the agent only ever holds stand-in keys and the real ones are swapped in on the way out. Secrets are encrypted, and each agent can get its own Slack app.
Good for: companies whose main worry is agents holding raw passwords for tools like Gmail, GitHub or Jira, and who want a human to approve sensitive actions before they leave the building.
Where it falls short: OneCLI runs its own agents, not Hermes. Its own comparison page admits it has nothing like Hermes’ self-improving skills and memory, and putting Hermes behind it is a “ask us in Discord and we will help” job rather than a supported option. There is no live view of what an agent is doing, no workspace backups, and some features need a paid license in production. Claworc’s External Connections give you the same keep-the-keys-out design across 1,500+ services, for the real Hermes, with the rest of the fleet tooling included.
4. The ultraworkers Helm chart
Section titled “4. The ultraworkers Helm chart”ultraworkers/hermes-agent-helm-chart is the community package most Kubernetes tutorials point to. It installs one Hermes with locked-down defaults in a single command.
Good for: Kubernetes teams who want one Hermes running quickly and are comfortable editing configuration files.
Where it falls short: it is one agent per install with no management layer on top: no dashboard, no backups, no key handling, no teammates. Its “multi-tenant” mode defines a template for tenants but ships no software that acts on it. Its locked-down defaults also clash with the official Hermes image, which expects admin rights inside its container, and people have filed issues about it. Activity appears to have stalled since April 2026.
5. hermesclaw
Section titled “5. hermesclaw”hermesclaw is a community package that puts Hermes in the same kind of sealed box NemoClaw uses, with three preset strictness levels and a plain Docker mode for machines that cannot run the box.
Good for: trying out sealed-box Hermes on one machine without adopting NVIDIA’s whole workflow.
Where it falls short: NemoClaw now supports Hermes directly, which leaves hermesclaw with little reason to exist. The plain Docker mode gives you none of the protection the presets promise. And like NemoClaw, it offers no fleet screen, no chat, no backups and no per-teammate access.
6. Nora
Section titled “6. Nora”Nora is a self-hosted control plane that treats OpenClaw and Hermes as equals. It runs on Docker or Kubernetes, gives operators a dashboard with a terminal and live logs into each agent, stores credentials in an encrypted vault, takes encrypted backups, supports teams and roles, and can be scripted end to end.
Good for: teams who want to automate fleet operations from scripts and already have monitoring tools to plug it into.
Where it falls short: it is the closest rival to Claworc on this list, but it is young. There is no built-in chat with an agent, step-by-step tracing and agents finding each other are still on the roadmap, the project says its first-run experience is still being polished, and its lightweight-VM mode is described by the project itself as not fully isolated. A recent release fixed a bug that could wipe an agent’s data during deployment, which is the kind of scar you would rather a control plane already had.
7. Paperclip hermes-operator
Section titled “7. Paperclip hermes-operator”hermes-operator is a Kubernetes add-on that lets you declare Hermes agents in configuration and have the cluster keep them running. It takes backups to cloud storage, updates itself with rollback, gives each agent private network access, fits into GitOps workflows and ships signed images.
Good for: platform teams who already run everything on Kubernetes through configuration files and want Hermes to be one more thing they manage that way.
Where it falls short: it gives you infrastructure, not a product. There is no console for chatting with an agent, watching it work, or restoring a backup with a click, and it does nothing to keep API keys away from agents. It is Kubernetes-only, so a simple Docker host is out. And it is very young: its README calls it 1.0 while the latest release is 0.2, and the same publisher’s OpenClaw operator is the far better-proven codebase.
The bottom line
Section titled “The bottom line”Every option here can put Hermes to work. The question is who handles everything else: keeping agents apart, holding the keys, connecting agents to the tools your team already uses, taking backups, deciding who can use what, and showing you what each agent is doing right now. Sealed boxes like NemoClaw answer one question and nothing else. Kubernetes packages answer the “keep it running” question and hand the rest back to you. Credential tools like OneCLI solve one slice.
If you are running more than one Hermes agent and want it to be safe and simple rather than a standing side project, start with the quickstart or browse the source on GitHub.