Two open-source projects are fighting for the same job — “make my AI agents work together instead of in parallel silos” — but they come at it from opposite poles. hcom is a peer-to-peer messaging bus: a chatroom where every agent is an equal. ORCH is a hierarchical orchestration engine: a company where every agent has a role, a manager, and a mandatory review gate. Same problem, opposite philosophies.
Full disclosure up front: I’ve contributed to hcom’s ACP integration (so Hermes can join the bus), so I’m not neutral on that one. All numbers below were fetched from GitHub at publish time.
