head to head · open source
huginn vs cilium
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars, 4,339 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cilium has 25,759 stars, 4,207 forks, 1,085 open issues and last shipped yesterday. huginn leads on adoption by 95% (50,269 vs 25,759 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; cilium is written in Go under Apache-2.0. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, cilium 16%. cilium 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 | cilium | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 26K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 4.2K |
| 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 cilium if
- You want the cilium 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 cilium fits your workflow better
About huginn
What is Huginn? Huginn is a system for building agents that perform automated tasks for you online. They can read the web, watch for events, and take actions on your behalf. Huginn's Agents create and consume events, propagating them along a directed graph. Think of it as a hackable version of IFTTT or Zapier on your own server. You always know who has your data. You do. Here are some of the things that you can do with Huginn: Track the weather and get an email when it's going to rain (or snow) tomorrow ("Don't forget your umbrella!") List terms that you care about and receive email when their occurrence on…
read the full huginn overview →
About cilium
.. raw:: html Cilium is a networking, observability, and security solution with an eBPF based dataplane. It provides a simple flat Layer 3 network with the ability to span multiple clusters in either a native routing or overlay mode. It is L7 protocol aware and can enforce network policies on L3 L7 using an identity based security model that is decoupled from network addressing. Cilium implements distributed load balancing for traffic between pods and to external services, and is able to fully replace kube proxy, using efficient hash tables in eBPF, allowing for almost unlimited scale. It also supports advanced…
read the full cilium overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or cilium more popular?
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars and cilium has 25,759. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and cilium free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and cilium under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and cilium?
huginn is written in Ruby and cilium 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 cilium?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (50,269 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose cilium if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.