head to head · open source
huginn vs alloy
huginn has 49,969 GitHub stars, 4,299 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped today. alloy has 3,547 stars, 709 forks, 1,237 open issues and last shipped today. huginn leads on adoption by 1,309% (49,969 vs 3,547 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; alloy is written in Go under Apache-2.0. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, alloy 20%. alloy 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 | alloy | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 3.5K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 709 |
| 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 alloy if
- You want the alloy 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 alloy 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 alloy
Grafana Alloy is an open source OpenTelemetry Collector distribution with built in Prometheus pipelines and support for metrics, logs, traces, and profiles. What can Alloy do? Programmable pipelines : Use a rich [expression based syntax][syntax] for configuring powerful observability pipelines. OpenTelemetry Collector Distribution : Alloy is a [distribution][] of OpenTelemetry Collector and supports dozens of its components, alongside new components that make use of Alloy's programmable pipelines. Big tent : Alloy embraces Grafana's "big tent" philosophy, where Alloy can be used with other vendors or open source …
read the full alloy overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or alloy more popular?
huginn has 49,969 GitHub stars and alloy has 3,547. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and alloy free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and alloy under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and alloy?
huginn is written in Ruby and alloy 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 alloy?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (49,969 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose alloy if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.