So you've got a Hermes Agent instance running, self-hosted, memory intact, tools wired up, and now comes the question nobody warns you about beforehand: how do you sit down and talk to it, every day, from your desk, a client site, or your phone at 11pm when a deal needs a nudge? Nous Research ships three official ways in, and they're not competing products fighting for your loyalty. They're three doors into the same room. This post is the practical guide to picking the door that fits how you work, and there's a decent chance the right answer is more than one.
One agent, three doors in
Hermes Workspace, Hermes Desktop, and the Hermes AI Mobile App are all front ends. None of them is the agent. Your Hermes Agent instance, self-hosted, holding its own memory, running its own tools, exists independently of whichever screen you're looking at. Open Workspace in a browser tab Monday morning, check in from the Mobile App at lunch, switch to Desktop that evening, and you're talking to the exact same agent with the exact same memory the whole time. You're choosing a window into a room that doesn't change shape depending on which window you use.
That distinction matters for how you think about this decision. You're not picking a product family and living with the tradeoffs forever, the way you might when choosing between two competing SaaS platforms. You're picking an interface, and interfaces can be swapped, layered, or run in parallel without touching the agent underneath. If you've read our piece on why Hermes AI search interest just spiked, this is the same "one ecosystem, several entry points" idea, applied to the specific question of which screen you spend your day looking at.
For a Human in the Loop shop like ours, this framing isn't incidental. Keeping a human in the loop means someone can see what the agent is doing and step in before something client-facing goes out. A well-matched interface is what makes that review step fast instead of annoying. Pick the wrong front end and you'll either avoid checking in as often as you should, or fight the interface every time you do.
Hermes Workspace: the full command centre
Hermes Workspace is the deepest of the three, and it's the one to reach for if you think of your agent setup as something closer to a small operations desk than a chat window.
It's free, open source, built in TypeScript and React, and ships as a Progressive Web App with full mobile browser support, so the same interface works whether you're on a laptop or in a phone browser with nothing to install. Connect it to any OpenAI-compatible backend for the baseline experience; pair it with the Hermes gateway and it unlocks the fuller feature set, sessions, memory browsing, skills, and jobs, all inside one interface. Chat, files, memory, skills, and a terminal live side by side rather than scattered across separate apps.
The feature that sets Workspace apart is Swarm Mode: a tmux-backed system for running multiple autonomous workers at once, each with a role, dispatching tasks and tracking progress on a Kanban board you can watch move. If you want the agent working more than one thread at a time, research running in one lane, drafts moving in another, this is built for exactly that. It can also manage a genuinely large skill library, north of 2,000 skills, browse MCP catalogs, and drop into a cross-platform PTY terminal when you want a real shell.
Who this fits: a small team sharing one agent, or a solo operator who wants a proper command centre rather than a single conversation window. If "using the agent" means checking memory, browsing installed skills, and orchestrating more than one task thread at once, Workspace does more of that work for you than the other two front ends.
Hermes Desktop: the native power-user GUI
Hermes Desktop solves a different problem. Where Workspace is a command centre, Desktop is a native app built to make installing, configuring, and running Hermes Agent painless without living in a terminal.
It gives you chat, memory management, skills, tools, profiles, and scheduling from one graphical interface, and it can point at a local Hermes instance on your machine or a remote one on a server elsewhere. That local-or-remote flexibility is what makes Desktop useful beyond being "Workspace as an app": run the agent on a home server or a rented box and still get a fast, native GUI on your laptop.
Who this fits: a single power user who wants the full feature set, memory, skills, tools, scheduling, without living in a web page, and who notices the small frictions a native app removes: faster startup, no browser tab competing for attention, a UI that feels like it belongs to the OS.
Hermes AI Mobile App: check in from anywhere
The Mobile App, "Hermes AI: Personal Agent" on the iOS App Store, is the lightest of the three by design, and that's the point rather than a limitation. It connects to your own Hermes Agent instance and gives you a mobile control centre: enough to see what the agent has been doing, nudge it toward something, and stay in the loop without opening a laptop.
This is the interface for the moments Workspace and Desktop weren't built for: glancing at what the agent flagged overnight between meetings, checking at a client site whether a follow-up went out, or running the kind of one-person setup we walked through in The One-Person Company: Running Solo Operations on a Hermes Agent, where the appeal is that your agent is reachable wherever you are, not just wherever your laptop is.
Who this fits: anyone who wants lightweight oversight on the move rather than a full working session on a phone screen. Nobody's orchestrating Swarm Mode from their thumbs, and that's fine, that's not what this door is for.
A simple decision framework
If you're still weighing which one to set up first, three questions tend to settle it fast.
Team size answers a lot of it on its own. Solo and mostly checking in on the move, the Mobile App becomes your daily driver, with Desktop or Workspace for the sessions where you sit down to work. A small team sharing one agent, coordinating on shared context with multiple task threads running at once, points to Workspace, because the command-centre layout and Swarm Mode are built for exactly that.
Technical comfort matters too. Happiest in a browser, wanting a PWA you can open from any device without installing anything: that's Workspace. Preferring a native app that feels like it belongs to your machine rather than a website: that's Desktop.
Mobility settles the rest. Most of your working day happens at one desk, so Desktop or Workspace covers it fully. Regularly away from that desk, client meetings, travel, a business that runs partly out of your pocket, and you'll want the Mobile App added so you're never more than a glance from what the agent's doing.
None of this is exclusive. Plenty of the setups we've done end up running two, an operator using Desktop at their main machine and the Mobile App in between, or a small team on Workspace with a few people also carrying the Mobile App for after-hours checks. Since all three connect to the same agent instance, there's no real cost to running more than one beyond a few minutes of configuration.
How INS handles this in a setup engagement
When we run a Hermes Agent Installation engagement, picking the front end is part of the same conversation as the rest of the setup, not something bolted on at the end. We ask how you work before touching configuration: solo or team, desk-bound or mobile, full Workspace command centre from day one, or start simple on Desktop and add Workspace later once Swarm Mode's orchestration is worth the complexity.
From there we configure whichever front end, or combination, fits: connecting it to your Hermes Agent instance correctly, setting up the gateway pairing if you want Workspace's fuller feature set, and keeping memory and sessions consistent no matter which door you walk in through. For teams, that's often Workspace as the shared command centre plus Mobile App access for on-the-go checks. For solo founders, it's frequently Desktop for daily driving with Mobile App as the safety net. Either way, you leave with an interface that matches your actual day, not just whichever one was easiest to install first.
Frequently asked questions
Can I use more than one of these at the same time?
Yes, and a lot of our clients do. Since Workspace, Desktop, and the Mobile App are all front ends connecting to the same Hermes Agent instance, nothing stops you running Desktop at your main workstation and the Mobile App on your phone for everything in between. The only real cost is a few minutes configuring each connection.
Do I lose memory or context switching between interfaces?
No. Memory lives with the agent instance, not with whichever front end you're using. Start a conversation in Hermes Workspace over lunch, pick it back up on Desktop that evening, and the agent's context carries straight through, because you never switched agents, just the window you were looking through.
Is Swarm Mode only available in Hermes Workspace?
Yes, Swarm Mode, the tmux-backed system for running multiple role-based workers with Kanban-tracked task dispatching, is a Workspace feature specifically. If multi-task orchestration is why you want a command centre, that's the strongest reason to make Workspace your primary interface.
Which one should I set up first if I'm not sure yet?
Start with whichever matches where you spend most of your working hours: Desktop for a single machine, Workspace for a shared team setup, Mobile if you're mostly away from a desk. Add the others later; none of them lock you in. If you'd rather skip the trial and error, our Hermes Agent Installation service includes exactly this conversation as part of setup. Email team@ins.ae or message us on WhatsApp at +971 58 995 4553 and we'll help you match the interface to how you work.
