head to head · open source
huginn vs Checkmk
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars, 4,298 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Checkmk has 2,368 stars, 555 forks, 55 open issues and last shipped yesterday. huginn leads on adoption by 2,010% (49,967 vs 2,368 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; Checkmk is written in Python under GPL-2.0. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, Checkmk 23%. Checkmk 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 | Checkmk | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 2.4K |
| License | MIT | GPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 555 |
| 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 Checkmk if
- You want the Checkmk feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and Checkmk 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 Checkmk
Checkmk is a comprehensive IT monitoring system for infrastructure and application monitoring across physical, virtual, containerized, and cloud environments. It is an open source Python project released under the GNU GPL v2, and it lives in the infrastructure monitoring and observability ecosystem. The project provides a central monitoring engine, a web based interface, and support for many official and community maintained plugins.
read the full Checkmk overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or Checkmk more popular?
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars and Checkmk has 2,368. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and Checkmk free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and Checkmk under GPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and Checkmk?
huginn is written in Ruby and Checkmk 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 Checkmk?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (49,967 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Checkmk if its feature set, stack or GPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.