head to head · open source
huginn vs btrace
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars, 4,298 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. btrace has 5,994 stars, 956 forks, 6 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. huginn leads on adoption by 734% (49,967 vs 5,994 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; btrace is written in Java under Apache-2.0. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, btrace 16%. huginn was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | btrace | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 6.0K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 956 |
| 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 btrace if
- You want the btrace feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and btrace 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 btrace
BTrace is an open source dynamic tracing and diagnostics tool for Java applications, distributed under the Apache 2.0 license and maintained in the Java and JVM ecosystem. It works by attaching to a running Java Virtual Machine and dynamically instrumenting bytecode at runtime, injecting tracing code into classes that are already loaded. The project sits in the Infrastructure & Operations / Monitoring & Observability category and carries the topics tracing, observability, diagnostics, profiling, bytecode instrumentation, runtime instrumentation, java agent and dtrace.
read the full btrace overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or btrace more popular?
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars and btrace has 5,994. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and btrace free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and btrace under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and btrace?
huginn is written in Ruby and btrace in Java. 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 btrace?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (49,967 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose btrace if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.