head to head · open source
huginn vs agent
huginn has 49,969 GitHub stars, 4,299 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped yesterday. agent has 1,743 stars, 511 forks, 93 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. huginn leads on adoption by 2,767% (49,969 vs 1,743 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; agent is written in Go under Apache-2.0. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, agent 29%. huginn was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (agent, monitoring), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| huginn | agent | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 1.7K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-07-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 511 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick huginn if
- You weight community size — 50K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick agent if
- You want the agent feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and agent fits your workflow better
About huginn
Huginn is an open source system for building agents that perform automated tasks online, written in Ruby and released under the MIT license. Its agents read the web, watch for events, and take actions on the user's behalf. Internally, agents create and consume events that propagate along a directed graph, which means one agent's output becomes another agent's input and a chain of small steps can be composed into a larger workflow. The project lives in the Ruby ecosystem and is distributed as an official Docker image or installed locally from a forked repository.
read the full huginn overview →
About agent
Grafana Agent is a vendor neutral, OpenTelemetry Collector distribution that wires programmable components into pipelines for collecting, transforming, and shipping metrics, logs, traces, and continuous profiles, aimed at platform and observability engineers who route telemetry across the Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and Grafana open source ecosystems.
read the full agent overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or agent more popular?
huginn has 49,969 GitHub stars and agent has 1,743. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and agent free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and agent under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and agent?
huginn is written in Ruby and agent in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, huginn or agent?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (49,969 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose agent if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.