head to head · open source
huginn vs beszel
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars, 4,298 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. beszel has 25,459 stars, 1,019 forks, 313 open issues and last shipped yesterday. huginn leads on adoption by 96% (49,967 vs 25,459 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; beszel is written in Go under MIT. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, beszel 4%. beszel 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 | beszel | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 25K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 1.0K |
| 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 beszel if
- You want the beszel feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and beszel 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 beszel
Beszel is a lightweight server monitoring platform written in Go and released under the MIT License. It consists of two components: a hub, which is a web application built on PocketBase and provides the dashboard for viewing and managing connected systems, and an agent, which runs on each system being monitored and communicates system metrics back to the hub. The project lives in the self hosted, homelab oriented monitoring ecosystem, alongside the broader category of Infrastructure and Operations tooling, and it is distributed primarily through Docker images published as henrygd/beszel for the hub and henrygd/be…
read the full beszel overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or beszel more popular?
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars and beszel has 25,459. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and beszel free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and beszel under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and beszel?
huginn is written in Ruby and beszel 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 beszel?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (49,967 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose beszel if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.