head to head · open source
huginn vs Checkmate
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars, 4,298 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Checkmate has 10,830 stars, 1,200 forks, 114 open issues and last shipped yesterday. huginn leads on adoption by 361% (49,967 vs 10,830 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; Checkmate is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, Checkmate 11%. Checkmate 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 | Checkmate | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 11K |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| 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 Checkmate if
- You want the Checkmate feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and Checkmate 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 Checkmate
Checkmate is an open source, self hosted monitoring application for infrastructure and observability. It is written in TypeScript and released under the AGPL 3.0 license. The repository contains the frontend and backend, and the project sits in the infrastructure monitoring ecosystem for teams that need to track servers, websites, and hardware status without relying on a hosted only product.
read the full Checkmate overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or Checkmate more popular?
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars and Checkmate has 10,830. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and Checkmate free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and Checkmate under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and Checkmate?
huginn is written in Ruby and Checkmate in TypeScript. 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 Checkmate?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (49,967 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Checkmate if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.