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AI assistants: guides & tutorials

Self-hosted AI assistants: OpenClaw, NemoClaw, and Hermes Agent on Liquid Web VPS or GPU. Gateway-first vs agent-first architectures compared.

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Self-hosted AI assistants like OpenClaw, NemoClaw, and Hermes Agent run on your own VPS or GPU, comparing gateway-first and agent-first architectures. These guides cover deploying and securing them.

Owning the assistant stack keeps data and tool access on your infrastructure. Apify gives these assistants a reliable scraping capability to call. Below you will find setup and comparison guides.

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OpenClaw11 min read

OpenClaw vs Hermes Agent: Which Self-Hosted AI Assistant Is Right for You? (2026)

· 11 min read
Yassine El Haddad
Yassine El Haddad
Software Developer & Automation Specialist

OpenClaw and Hermes Agent are both self-hosted AI assistants you run on your own hardware — but they solve different problems. OpenClaw is a gateway that routes messages to an LLM and executes skills on demand. Hermes Agent is an autonomous agent with persistent memory and a learning loop that improves on repeated workflows. This post compares the two directly so you can choose the right tool for your setup.

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Frequently asked questions

Frequently Asked Questions

OpenClaw (gateway-first, routes across LLM providers), NemoClaw (policy-enforcement layer for OpenClaw), and Hermes Agent (agent-first, persistent memory + learning loop from Nous Research). All three run on a Liquid Web Managed VPS or GPU server via Docker Compose.

Not necessarily. OpenClaw and NemoClaw proxy to remote LLM APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI) and run on a 4–8 GB CPU VPS. Hermes Agent with a local Ollama backend needs a Liquid Web GPU server for the model inference. If you connect to remote APIs instead, a Liquid Web 8 GB VPS is sufficient.