Claude Tag vs Hermes

Claude Tag is Anthropic's AI teammate that lives in Slack. You can tag @Claude directly in a Slack thread and delegate work where the rest of my team can see the context and output.

Our team has been using Viktor, so when Claude Tag came out we were curious to see how it compared, but were hit with quite a bit of friction just to try it out.

To use Claude Tag you need at least a 5-team seat of Claude. We have 3 Claude seats that the team signed up for individually, so instead of jumping into using Claude Tag, we had to first untangle our admin and billing logistics (not to mention pay for extra seats we don't need at the moment).

Once we got in, we noticed that Claude Tag doesn't have persistent memory across channels. You get one Claude Tag per channel. Likely makes sense for enterprises, but for our team this is a bit of a bummer.

For example, what we discuss in our SEO channel, often impacts Engineering and vice versa. Viktor sees both, so can answer engineering questions with much more context. But with Claude Tag, we end up needing to re-explain things twice which is exactly the kind of burnout that we're trying to avoid by bringing an AI tool right within Slack.

Right now, I'd mainly recommend Claude Tag for engineering teams or enterprises already using Claude and want help with collaborative coding and problem solving.

• Powerful for coding
• Easy setup if already on Team/Enterprise subscriptions with Claude

• Minimum 2 seats means $50/month baseline
• One Claude instance per channel, so no cross-channel memory
• Minimal integrations with third party tools
• Doesn't work as well as Viktor for work outside of coding
• Requires Slack

Anthropic's own team says they use Claude Tag to write 65% of their code.

The AI can inspect your codebase, pull in deploy context, compare what changed, and identify the root cause when something breaks.

You get one Claude Tag per channel. It doesn't hop across channels, which is intentional for privacy but we find this loses the connective context across all channels. With more privacy, it becomes less helpful.

The actual pricing/cost comes from the credit usage with Claude Tag, as you get an incredibly low limit with just the base plans. But technically, you can get started with the following:

• Team Plan: $20/seat/month (billed annually) or $25/seat/month (billed monthly). Minimum 2 seats, designed for teams of 2-150 people.
• Enterprise: Starts at $20/seat plus usage-based charges at API rates. Best for large organizations needing custom security and controls.

Hermes is an open-source AI agent that you host yourself. You install the software, connect an AI model and your chat apps, and configure it to perform tasks for you. Hermes is NOT FOR YOU if you are not technical. Do not buy into the propaganda that using Hermes is "cheaper" because the software is free. You need to pay for hosting, model usage, not to mention your time to maintain it and ensure it has proper secure guardrails in place.

Hermes is best for technical users who enjoy self-hosting and experimenting with open-source software. But if you're a business looking for an AI employee, you should not choose Hermes.

Our team employs two full-time engineers who could set up and manage Hermes, but it still wouldn't be a good use of their time.

• Free and open source
• Gives you control over the software and configuration
• Can run on your own hardware or server
• Works with chat apps such as Slack, Telegram, Discord, and WhatsApp
• Highly customizable for technical users

• Complicated to install and configure
• Requires ongoing maintenance and troubleshooting
• Makes you responsible for security and reliability
• Sessions may stall, freeze, or need to be reset
• Server and AI model costs can add up
• Not practical for most nontechnical users or busy teams

Hermes is free, open source, and runs on your own hardware or server. This gives you more control over the software, data, and configuration than you would get from a managed AI assistant.

Sounds good right? Well be prepared to handle the setup, updates, security, reliability, and maintenance yourself. If you have no idea what this all means, skip Hermes.

Hermes can communicate through apps such as Slack, Telegram, Discord, and WhatsApp. This allows you to interact with it inside the tools you already use instead of opening a separate AI app.

However, it isn't as comprehensive out of the box as a managed AI teammate. Most AI agents have already built thousands of integrations with third party apps so you're behind if you're using Hermes.

• Hermes software: Free and open source.
• AI model usage: Varies depending on the model and provider you connect.
• Hosting: Varies depending on whether you use your own hardware or rent a server.
• Setup and maintenance: The largest hidden cost, especially if you need an engineer or consultant to manage it.