Hermes — The Messenger Agent
A dedicated, isolated agent whose only job is to deliver signals — between your AI workforce, your humans, and the outside world. Every notification, every webhook, every translation, every retry — logged and signed.
OpenClawPro ships Hermes as a standard add-on on every Managed and Self-Hosted plan from Pro upward. It runs in its own container — no shared memory, no shared secrets, no cross-contamination.
What Hermes Does
Six capabilities that turn a chaotic multi-agent setup into a clean, observable messaging layer.
Multi-Channel Delivery
Dispatches signals to WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack, email, and any webhook endpoint. One agent, every channel.
Smart Routing
Routes notifications based on priority, recipient, and content. Critical alerts go to Slack on-call; weekly digests go to email.
Isolated by Design
Runs in its own Docker container on a dedicated network. No access to your other agents' memory, code, or secrets — unless you grant it.
Audit-Logged
Every message, every delivery attempt, every retry — all timestamped and signed. Full reproducibility for compliance and debugging.
Inbound Webhooks Too
Hermes accepts incoming webhooks from Stripe, GitHub, Linear, Calendly, and 50+ other services — turning them into actionable events for your AI team.
Auto-Translation
Optionally translates outbound messages into recipient's preferred language. Powered by OpenClaw's LLM backend.
Real Use Cases
How Hermes is deployed in the wild — patterns we install for every Pro+ customer.
Daily Standups
Your dev agents push status updates to Hermes, which compiles them into a single Slack message at 9 AM every morning — formatted, deduplicated, in your team's tone.
Customer Notifications
When your support agent resolves a ticket, Hermes sends the confirmation email (with the customer's preferred language) and updates the CRM.
Approval Gates
When an agent wants to spend > $500 or merge to production, Hermes sends an approval request to the human on call and waits for the yes/no answer.
Incident Routing
Monitor agent emits an alert → Hermes wakes the on-call engineer via PagerDuty/Telegram, attaching context, runbook link, and recent logs.
Why a Separate Agent?
A messaging layer that lives inside the same process as your business agents is a liability: one prompt-injection in a customer email can pivot into your CRM, your code, your spending. Hermes is built to prevent that.
- Runs in its own Docker container, on a dedicated Docker network.
- No read access to other agents' memory, code, or secrets — explicit allow-list only.
- Outbound calls go through a small, audited set of HTTP libraries — no exec, no eval, no file system.
- Every inbound payload is parsed, validated, and re-emitted as a typed event — no raw forwarding.
- Token budget and rate limits are enforced at the container boundary, not at the LLM layer.
Technical Specs
Hermes is intentionally minimal. Less surface area, fewer dependencies, faster audits.
Container
Alpine 3.20 · 28 MB image
Memory
< 64 MB at idle, 128 MB peak
Latency
< 150 ms p99 webhook → channel
Throughput
300+ msg/s on a single instance
Storage
Optional Redis or local SQLite for queue + audit
License
AGPL-3.0 — Open Source
Included in Pro+ Plans
Hermes Messaging Agent
Standard add-on at no extra cost on Managed Pro, Business, and Self-Hosted Pro/Expert plans. Standalone install is also available on Essential or for existing OpenClaw deployments.
Hermes in the OpenClaw Family
Each OpenClaw component has a clear role. Hermes is the messenger.
OpenClaw →
The brain. Persistent memory, tool use, channel integrations. Hermes delivers what OpenClaw decides.
NemoClaw →
Coordinates teams of OpenClaw agents. Hermes is the messaging fabric NemoClaw uses to broadcast and collect status.
Paperclip →
Full autonomous AI company. Hermes is the audit trail every Paperclip Enterprise install ships with by default.
Ship Signals, Not Surprises.
Stop juggling webhooks, retries, channel formats, and translations across half a dozen agents. Hermes does it once, in one container, with one audit log.