Hermes Agent vs. OpenClaw: Features, Scraping, and Proxy Setup Compared

TL;DR

• Hermes Agent saves a skill every time it solves a task, then reuses it later. OpenClaw gives you thousands of ready-made skills instead.
• OpenClaw can scrape the web right after you install it. Hermes scrapes through skills and MCP servers.
• To scrape protected sites at scale, you'll need a proxy or Web Scraping API with either tool.
• Decodo adds to OpenClaw as a ClawHub skill. With Hermes, you connect to it through proxy endpoints or call its API from a skill.

What is Hermes Agent?

Hermes Agent is an open-source framework from Nous Research, released on February 25, 2026, under the MIT license. Its main feature is a learning loop: when it finishes a task, Hermes checks whether the result worked, saves the useful steps as a skill file, and reuses that file the next time a similar task comes up. Therefore, the agent doesn't start from scratch each time.

You don't need much hardware to run it. A $5 VPS works, and so does a GPU cluster or a serverless setup, with almost no cost when it's idle. You also get to pick the model. Hermes works with OpenRouter, Nous Portal, NVIDIA NIM, Anthropic, OpenAI, a local Ollama instance, or any endpoint you choose. You can reach it from a terminal, a desktop app, a browser dashboard, or more than fifteen messaging apps, including Telegram, Discord, Slack, and WhatsApp.

The project grew fast. Hermes passed roughly 99K GitHub stars within two months of launch, which Dealroom called the fastest start of any agent framework this year. Its memory runs on Honcho, which models what it learns about you. Skills follow the agentskills.io standard, so you can move them between agents.

What is OpenClaw?

OpenClaw connects an AI model to the open web. It controls a browser, fetches pages, and works with your system, which lets the agent move through sites, read content, and take action.

Most of what OpenClaw can do comes from ClawHub, its community registry. ClawHub holds thousands of skills for scraping, DevOps, productivity, and SaaS tools. Each skill is a simple SKILL.md markdown file, which is why so many people have written one. You set the agent's personality in a SOUL.md file and tell it what to remember in MEMORY.md.

OpenClaw launched earlier this year and already got 378K stars. However, such fast adoption and integration into the local computer environment raised quite a few security questions. Several CVEs appeared in early 2026 after adoption spiked, one of them serious, and the security section below covers them.

Hermes Agent vs. OpenClaw: Feature comparison

The table below compares both frameworks on the points that usually decide the choice. Use it as a quick reference, then check it against your own needs.

Hermes leads in 2 areas – how well it learns from the tasks and the security it includes by default. Once it reuses 20 or more of its own skills, similar tasks finish about 40% faster, based on TokenMix benchmarks. OpenClaw's strength is its much larger skill catalog and a plugin marketplace that's had time to grow. The choice comes down to one question. Do you want an agent that improves as it works, or a large set of tools you can use today?

Release speed is worth noting, too. In its first few months, Hermes added 3-tier memory, MCP server management with OAuth, and an OpenAI-compatible API server. OpenClaw has a longer history and more contributors, which is why its registry is so large. The right pick depends on your timeline. If you run an agent daily for 6 months, Hermes keeps learning and saves you more time over that period. If your team needs 10 integrations working by Monday, OpenClaw gets you there faster.

Use Cases: When to choose each

Each tool fits a different kind of work. The 2 lists below match common goals to the tool that handles them better.

Best use cases for Hermes Agent

Choose Hermes for long-running work, where it helps to have an agent that remembers what happened before.

• A personal assistant that keeps your preferences from one week to the next
• Tasks that run on a cloud server while you check in from Telegram
• Reinforcement learning runs on large-scale training data generation
• Setups where you want injection scanning and credential filtering turned on by default
• An always-on agent running on a cheap VPS or your own workstation

Best use cases for OpenClaw

Choose OpenClaw when you want a wide range of features, and you want them working the same day.

• Browser automation across many different sites
• Quick prototypes built on community plugins you don't have to write yourself
• Chatops across several messaging platforms
• Work that depends on a deep, pre-built skill library

Both tools compete with narrower options. Claude Code works inside your code editor, while CrewAI and Agent Zero focus on orchestration. Hermes and OpenClaw aim wider, running general agents across chat, scraping, and automation rather than staying inside an IDE.

Web scraping capabilities compared

An AI agent reads a page the way a person does. Ask it for the support email, and it finds the address no matter where the address sits in the HTML. The benefit is simple. Your scraper keeps working when a site changes its layout, instead of breaking the way selector-based scripts do.

OpenClaw is ready to scrape as soon as you install it. Its web_fetch tool handles basic pages, and ClawHub skills do more. The Decodo Web Scraping API skill returns clean, structured data from JavaScript-heavy and protected pages, and it gets past anti-bot defenses, CAPTCHAs, and IP blocks without you managing any of that yourself.

Hermes scrapes through its own tools, its skills, and MCP servers. You can connect any MCP-compatible browser or scraping tool, including Decodo’s MCP Server, and run your scraping workflows from there. The difference is memory. A Hermes agent remembers which site blocked it last time and adjusts. It can also save a working scrape as a skill, then load that skill when a similar site appears, which cuts setup time on repeat jobs.

OpenClaw builds its scraping around the browsing skill. That skill renders JavaScript, handles pagination, and saves results to local files or a workspace that stays in place. It stores cookies in browser profiles, so a login carries over from one run to the next. It also supports several search providers and switches automatically when one stops responding.

So OpenClaw has the larger ready-made catalog today, and Hermes catches up with reliability and memory. Both hit the same limit in the end. Neither one gets past strong bot detection, such as IP reputation checks, fingerprinting, and CAPTCHAs, without a proxy or scraping API doing the work underneath.

How to connect proxies to Hermes Agent and OpenClaw

Proxies keep a scraper running once the request volume climbs. Send a few hundred requests from one IP, and you'll quickly run into bans, throttling, and CAPTCHAs. Residential and rotating proxies spread requests across many IPs. Sticky sessions hold a single IP when the target needs you to stay logged in.

Connecting proxies to OpenClaw

OpenClaw handles proxy traffic inside its browsing and scraping skills. Most of those skills read an endpoint from the config file or an environment variable.

1. Sign up for the Decodo dashboard.
2. Choose a proxy type that best matches your use case, grab a free trial, or a subscription.
3. Get your proxy credentials from the dashboard.
4. Choose a rotating gateway for automatic IP changes, or a sticky session when you need a steady IP.
5. Add the HTTP, HTTPS, or SOCKS5 endpoint to the skill config or the .env file.
6. Send a test request to an IP-checker URL to confirm the routing works.

Connecting proxies to Hermes Agent

Hermes reads the standard proxy environment variables for its fetch layer. It also accepts a proxy-aware MCP scraping server if you'd rather manage routing inside the agent. The rotating-versus-sticky choice works the same as anywhere else.

1. Sign up for the Decodo dashboard.
2. Pick a proxy type, activate a free trial, or choose a subscription.
3. Get your proxy credentials from the dashboard.
4. Set HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY on the agent process, or pass the endpoint to a scraping skill.
5. Choose rotating or sticky based on whether the target needs a stable session.
6. Attach a proxy-aware MCP tool when you want routing handled inside the agent.
7. Test against an IP check URL before you scale up.

How to connect Decodo's Web Scraping API to both tools

Decodo's Web Scraping API handles the hard parts of scraping for you. It manages proxy rotation, browser rendering, CAPTCHA bypass, fingerprinting, and retries, and returns HTML, JSON, CSV, or Markdown. It runs on more than 125M IPs and offers a free starter plan with up to 1K requests.

Connect Decodo to OpenClaw

Decodo ships an official OpenClaw skill, explained in the Decodo-OpenClaw integration guide. The skill extends web_fetch with residential proxy routing, stealth mode, and automatic fallback when a request stalls.

1. Install the Decodo skill from ClawHub.
2. Add your Decodo API token to a .env file in the skill directory.
3. Point the agent at a URL, and the request goes out through Decodo's API.
4. Get the structured response back into your workflow.

Connect Decodo to Hermes Agent

You have 2 options with Hermes. The first treats Decodo as a proxy, so you plug its endpoints into the fetch layer like any HTTP or SOCKS5 proxy. The second calls the Web Scraping API directly from a skill or an MCP tool.

1. Generate proxy endpoints or an API token in the Decodo dashboard.

2. For the proxy option, set the endpoint in the Hermes environment variables (.env)

HTTP_PROXY=http://your-proxy-address:port
HTTPS_PROXY=http://your-proxy-address:port

HTTP_PROXY=http://your-proxy-address:port
HTTPS_PROXY=http://your-proxy-address:port

3. For the API option, write a skill that sends the target URL and your token to Decodo.

4. Parse the JSON or Markdown that it returns inside the agent.

This managed layer is worth the cost for production jobs, for targets with strong bot defenses, and for teams that don't want to manage proxy infrastructure. Keep one limit in mind. Decodo works with publicly accessible pages and won't handle login-protected or paywalled content, so follow each site's terms.

Security, reliability, and pricing

This is where the 2 frameworks separate most clearly. Hermes ships with security on by default, while OpenClaw spent early 2026 working through a string of serious problems. Here's how each one stacks up, followed by what you'll actually pay.

Security

Security is the strongest argument for Hermes right now, and the weakest spot for OpenClaw. The gap isn't small, and it's worth understanding before you connect either agent to your email, files, or accounts.

Hermes turns on prompt-injection scanning and credential filtering by default, and Nous Research curates the skills that ship with it. OpenClaw took a different path, and the result was a rough few months. A community tracker logged 137 security advisories for OpenClaw between February 2 and April 4, 2026, according to Blink. Researchers disclosed 9 CVEs in a single 4-day stretch in March.

2 of those flaws reached CVSS 9.9, the top of the severity scale. CVE-2026-32922 lets a paired device turn a pairing token into full admin access and remote code execution with a single API call. An earlier flaw, CVE-2026-25253 ("ClawBleed"), allowed one-click remote code execution through the agent's WebSocket and was confirmed exploited in the wild. Early scans found more than 135K OpenClaw instances exposed to the public internet, and a majority ran with no authentication at all.

The skill registry took a hit, too. A supply-chain campaign called ClawHavoc planted hundreds of malicious skills on ClawHub, disguised as Gmail, Notion, Slack, and GitHub integrations, that stole credentials and API tokens once installed. Reporting from Cyber Desserts put the count above 1.1K malicious skills at its peak. The danger is the permission level. A bad skill runs with whatever access you've granted the agent, so a stolen token can open your real accounts. Microsoft advised against running OpenClaw on machines that hold sensitive data.

Pricing pressure followed the security trouble. On April 4, 2026, Anthropic blocked Claude Pro and Max subscribers from running OpenClaw and other third-party agent tools on their flat-rate plans. Anyone who wanted to keep using Claude through OpenClaw had to move to metered, pay-as-you-go billing or a separate API key. Some heavy users saw costs climb sharply. None of this affects Hermes, which stays model-agnostic and never depended on that subsidy.

Reliability and pricing

Reliability tracks the same split as security, and pricing is close to even once you account for the model you run.

Nous Research curates and stress-tests the skills bundled with Hermes, so they tend to work without much debugging. OpenClaw trades that curation for sheer range, which means quality across its catalog runs hot and cold, and you carry more of the vetting yourself. Both frameworks are free and open source. Your real cost comes from the LLM provider and any proxy or scraping API you add. Self-hosting Hermes runs about five euros a month for always-on use, and a heavy task on a budget model costs around thirty cents.

Bottom line

The choice comes down to depth versus range. Hermes suits the agent you keep long-term, the one that improves over months, runs around the clock, and locks itself down by default. OpenClaw suits range, with a huge skill library and strong browser automation, you can have it running within hours. Either way, once your scraping gets serious, add a managed layer like Decodo's Web Scraping API underneath to handle the proxies and bot defenses.