OpenClaw trended very big very quickly. If you haven't heard of it yet, or aren't sure what it is, we'll run through a brief overview, use cases, and a comparison of OpenClaw and Hermes Agent.
What is OpenClaw (or Hermes Agent)?
These tools are AI harnesses that run on your computer. The goal is to run an autonomous agent that can do anything on a computer a human can do. That's the pitch, and they are trending because people are claiming to use them to replace their employees at a reduced cost.
Use cases and considerations.
Preface
I will start by saying there are good use cases for these harnesses but not as many as you might think. Most of the time I've found them to be overcomplicated for the task and inefficient.
The reason is AI does best with smaller, focused tasks. Also, rarely do you need an autonomous agent. With tools like n8n you can create automations easily to perform a variety of tasks.
Use cases
With that in mind, there are some good use cases for these harnesses and I will list one that came up recently.
A good friend of mine was paying someone to sign into websites with heavy anti-bot measures to gather info and create a plan/analyses for clients. He originally tried to automate this with n8n but was unable to get past the bot detection and authentication of the sites.
This is where Hermes Agent came in. Both Hermes Agent and OpenClaw have powerful plugins for navigating a website like a human. The agent was able to sign into the site and view the data. He was, in this case, able to completely shift that job to the agent rather than paying someone hourly to do it, and can process many more client requests than before.
OpenClaw vs. Hermes Agent
Both of these are incredibly similar, but after testing both there is a clear winner.
Hermes Agent
Hermes Agent can do everything OpenClaw can but was built by an AI Lab and is just all-around better. It is optimized specifically for how AIs operate and offers some key advantages. First, it doesn't send everything up with every request. Instead, it sends up a minimal system prompt and then creates markdown skill files for everything it learns. This alone reduces system prompts from 40k (OpenClaw) to 20k. That's 2x better token efficiency without any performance loss. In fact, the agent generally does better as it's focused on the task instead of reading everything it could possibly do every time.
Final thoughts
These tools are both incredible. I would definitely choose Hermes Agent over OpenClaw every time. They are very expensive though. After just an hour of playing with it I burned through 1M tokens. for 80-90% of use cases I would recommend building automations with tools like n8n or in Python but there is a significant amount of use cases they can be uniquely perfect for.