head to head · open source
huginn vs alerta
huginn has 49,969 GitHub stars, 4,299 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped yesterday. alerta has 2,529 stars, 374 forks, 34 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. huginn leads on adoption by 1,876% (49,969 vs 2,529 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; alerta is written in Python under Apache-2.0. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, alerta 15%. huginn was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (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 | alerta | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 2.5K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-06-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 374 |
| 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 alerta if
- You want the alerta feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and alerta 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 alerta
Alerta is an open source, Apache 2.0 licensed monitoring system in Python that aggregates alerts from any source into a single API driven server and web console, and it is aimed at operations and platform teams that want a scalable, low configuration alert aggregation layer instead of another polling based monitoring stack.
read the full alerta overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or alerta more popular?
huginn has 49,969 GitHub stars and alerta has 2,529. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and alerta free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and alerta under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and alerta?
huginn is written in Ruby and alerta in Python. 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 alerta?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (49,969 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose alerta if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.