Hermes Bot vs Grok Bot: Why I Switched (Honest)

I spent a full day on the hermes bot vs grok bot question, and I ended up moving my whole agent team over.

Not because Grok Bot is bad, because it isn't.

I moved because Hermes Bot Mode does the same job for free, on my own machine, with a different AI brain behind every single bot.

Teknium, the co-founder and lead engineer at Hermes Agent and Nous Research, dropped it as a one-day public beta plugin.

Someone said it looks a lot like Grok Bot, and his reply was three words: "That's the point."

This post is the switch story, not a spec sheet.

I'll tell you what my setup looked like before, what broke, what Bot Mode fixed in an afternoon, and where it still falls short.

🔥 Want the Hermes Bot Mode roster I run every day? Inside the AI Profit Boardroom I break down which bots to create first, what to write in each job description, and which model to pin to each one. Weekly coaching calls and 3,700+ members building the same thing. → Get access here

What my setup looked like before Bot Mode

Before this launch, Hermes Agent worked in sessions.

You open a chat, you give the agent a task, and it does the work.

Want a different kind of task done? You open another session.

That works fine for a week and then it turns into a mess.

My inbox summary lived in one session, my content research lived in another, and my competitor tracking lived in a third.

They all looked identical from the outside, which is a long list of chats with no faces, no names, and no jobs attached.

I was the routing layer, and that's a terrible use of a human.

What changed on day one

Bot Mode replaces the pile of sessions with a roster.

It's a panel down the left of your screen with named bots in it.

Each bot has its own avatar, its own personality, its own chat, its own memory, and its own schedule.

You click a bot and you're in a chat, exactly like messaging a person on your team.

Here's the part that saved me an entire afternoon.

My existing Hermes agent profiles automatically showed up as bots the moment I installed the plugin.

I rebuilt nothing.

Oracle, my competitor watcher, was just there.

Astros, which pulls keyword and content ideas out of our search data, was just there.

Apollo, which handles voice, was just there too.

They went from three profiles I hopped between manually to three teammates sitting side by side in one panel.

Hermes bot vs grok bot: the difference that actually matters

When you create or edit a bot there's an advanced section.

Inside it you can pin a specific model to that bot.

My research bot runs one model.

My writing bot runs another.

My inbox bot runs a small fast local model that lives on my own machine.

Every bot on the roster thinks with a different brain, and I chose each one deliberately.

Grok Bot doesn't work that way, because it runs on xAI's models inside xAI's cloud.

That means their agents, their infrastructure, and their rules.

Hermes Bot Mode is open source under an MIT licence, it's free, and it runs on my computer.

A big frontier model for the hard thinking, a free model for the cheap work, and a local model that never touches the internet for anything sensitive.

If you want help choosing, I covered the local side in the best Ollama model for Hermes Agent and the wider list in best Hermes Agent models.

Separate memory per bot fixed my biggest annoyance

Each bot keeps its own memory.

My research bot remembers what it researched.

My content bot remembers my writing style.

They don't blur into one confused history the way a single mega-session does.

Each one builds up its own history over time, like a team member who's been in the role for months.

That's also why cloning is such a big deal, and I'll get to that shortly.

The bots message each other now

Every bot has a persistent inbox called the Agent Inbox.

Bots can send messages to each other, and every message arrives with attribution.

The receiving bot knows exactly which agent sent it.

Each bot's personality file teaches it the protocol, including how to reply.

Then there are mentions, which is the feature I use constantly.

You type an @ sign and a bot's name inside any chat, like "@researcher have a look at this".

The bot you're talking to hands the message off, waits for the answer, and reports back in the same conversation.

Here's what that looks like in my actual work.

I'm drafting a blog post with my main bot.

I type "@researcher pull the latest facts on this topic".

The researcher digs with its own memory and its own model, sends the answer back, and my main bot folds it into the draft.

One conversation on my screen, two agents doing the work.

Oracle can now message Astros directly when it spots a competitor moving on a keyword, and that handoff used to be me copying and pasting between windows.

Someone in the community went further and had Hermes clone their entire Grok Bot structure, the coordinator plus every worker bot underneath it, straight into Bot Mode.

Same team layout, rebuilt on free software they fully control.

🔥 Not sure which bots your business needs first? That's exactly what we map out inside the AI Profit Boardroom, including the Agent Operating System, the 30-day roadmap, and daily step-by-step tutorials. → Get access here

Routines turned my bots into staff

Every bot gets its own routines panel.

A routine is just a recurring task on a schedule.

Summarise my inbox every morning.

Check my niche for new developments every day at noon.

Pull fresh content ideas every Monday.

You attach the routine to the bot whose job it is, and the results land in that bot's chat history.

When I wake up and click the inbox bot, the summary is already sitting there.

These run on Hermes cron jobs, which is the built-in scheduler Hermes already shipped with.

Nothing new was bolted on, and that matters more than it sounds.

I go further into scheduling patterns in Hermes Agent goals.

Why the architecture makes me trust it

A bot in Bot Mode is just a Hermes profile.

Profiles existed long before this launch.

Each profile is an isolated setup with its own config, memory, skills, credentials, and chat history, all stored in its own folder on your machine.

Bot Mode is a new interface layered on top of that.

No core patches, no background daemons on your computer, no extra storage system.

Teknium confirmed it when someone asked how this differs from profiles, calling it a new simplified experience for profiles.

That's why I'm comfortable building my business on it.

Plugins that hack around the system break on the next update.

This one only uses the standard surface Hermes already exposes, so it can't break that way.

It's a house on a foundation, not a treehouse nailed to a branch.

The soul file, and cloning a trained bot

Every bot has a SOUL.md file, which is its personality file.

It defines how the bot talks, what it cares about, and how it behaves.

You write a custom one for each bot.

Cloning copies everything, including the config, the skills, the personality file, and the memory.

If you've spent months training a research bot that knows your business inside out, you duplicate it and point the copy at a different project.

The new one starts with everything the original learned.

For anyone running multiple businesses or client accounts, that alone is worth the switch.

The avatars sound daft until you use them

Each bot gets a geometric face made from seven shapes and ten colours.

The eyes blink and scan back and forth while the bot is working.

You can upload your own image, generate an AI portrait, or give a bot a pixel pet that bounces next to its avatar while it's busy.

With six bots on the roster and three of them mid task, you can see at a glance who's actually working.

It's a status light with a personality attached.

I won't pretend it out-designs Grok Bot, because one of my viewers put it bluntly: "UI is a bit ugly in comparison."

That's a fair hit on a one-day beta.

What I'd tell you before you switch

This is a beta and it has rough edges, so here's the honest list.

It's a desktop plugin, so it installs on the machine running the Hermes desktop app, not on your server.

Early testers dropped it on their home server, saw nothing, and got confused.

If your Hermes gateway lives on a VPS, that's fine, because the desktop app connects remotely and Teknium confirmed remote gateways work.

You can't put multiple bots in one group chat yet, and when someone asked, the answer was "not yet".

It's one bot per chat right now, plus messaging and mentions between them.

Bot-to-bot delivery isn't an instant interrupt either, because the receiving bot picks up the message next time it runs.

Deleting a bot isn't in the interface on purpose, and it's done from the command line so you can't wipe a bot's memory with a misclick.

One viewer also flagged that bots go idle quickly when nobody's in the room, and the fix there is routines rather than hoping the bot invents work.

Frequently asked questions about hermes bot vs grok bot

Is switching from Grok Bot to Hermes Bot Mode hard?

Not really, because if you already have Hermes profiles they appear as bots automatically.

Someone even had Hermes clone a full Grok Bot coordinator-and-workers structure into Bot Mode in one go.

What does Hermes Bot Mode cost?

The software is free and open source under an MIT licence.

Your only cost is whatever models you pin to each bot, and local models cost nothing to run.

Can I run Hermes bots on my server instead of my laptop?

The plugin installs on the machine running the desktop app.

Your gateway can still live on a VPS, because the desktop app connects to remote gateways.

Does each bot really need its own model?

It doesn't need one, but it's the biggest advantage in the hermes bot vs grok bot comparison.

Pin a frontier model where quality matters and a cheap or local model where it doesn't, and your monthly bill drops hard.

Why do my bots stop doing anything after a while?

Bots respond to work, and without routines there's nothing pulling them forward.

Attach scheduled routines to each bot so they always have a job waiting on the clock.

Is Bot Mode going to break when Hermes updates?

Unlikely, because a bot is just a Hermes profile and Bot Mode only uses the standard interface Hermes already exposes.

It's also shipping into the main desktop app after the beta.

About Julian

I'm Julian Goldie, an AI entrepreneur, SEO expert, and founder of the AI Profit Boardroom with 3,700+ members inside.

I help business owners scale with AI agents, automation, and SEO.

I've got 417K+ YouTube subscribers, a 7-figure AI agency, daily training inside the Boardroom, and multiple AI automation playbooks to my name.

→ Get my best AI training inside the AI Profit Boardroom

Also On Our Network

🌐 Read on bestaiagentcommunity.com

🌐 Read on juliangoldieaiautomation.com

🌐 Read on aisuccesslabjuliangoldie.com

🌐 Read on aimoneylabjuliangoldie.com

Related reading

• Hermes Agent OS is the system my bot roster plugs into.
• Hermes Agent workspace covers where the day-to-day work actually happens.
• Hermes vs OpenClaw answers the other comparison I get asked about weekly.

Where I've landed

Grok Bot showed the world what an AI agent team looks like.

Hermes Bot Mode made that pattern free, open source, and mine.

Per-bot models, per-bot memory, and bots messaging each other, all running on hardware I own.

The tool matters less than the pattern, and the pattern is now everywhere.

Named agents with jobs, memory, schedules, and the ability to talk to each other.

Learn to run a roster once and the skill carries into every version of this that ships next.

Set yours up now and you'll have bots with months of built-up memory by the time everyone else installs it, which is the whole point of hermes bot vs grok bot.

📺 Video notes + links to the tools 👉 AI Profit Boardroom

🎥 Learn how I make these videos 👉 aiprofitboardroom.com

🆓 Get a FREE AI Course + Community + 1,000 AI Agents 👉 Free AI Money Lab