head to head · open source
huginn vs cilium
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars, 4,298 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. cilium has 25,232 stars, 4,071 forks, 1,085 open issues and last shipped yesterday. huginn leads on adoption by 98% (49,967 vs 25,232 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 | ★ 25K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 4.1K |
| 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
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 cilium
Cilium is a networking, observability, and security solution built on an eBPF based dataplane, written in Go and licensed under Apache 2.0. It lives in the Kubernetes ecosystem as a CNI implementation, and it is a CNCF project. At its foundation is eBPF, a Linux kernel technology that allows dynamic insertion of bytecode at integration points such as network IO, application sockets, and tracepoints, which is where Cilium implements its networking, security, and visibility logic. The project provides a flat Layer 3 network that can span multiple clusters in either native routing or overlay mode, and it is L7 proto…
read the full cilium overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or cilium more popular?
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars and cilium has 25,232. 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 (49,967 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose cilium if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.