head to head · open source
huginn vs clockwork
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars, 4,298 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. clockwork has 5,950 stars, 333 forks, 39 open issues and last shipped 20 days ago. huginn leads on adoption by 740% (49,967 vs 5,950 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; clockwork is written in PHP under MIT. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, clockwork 6%. 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 | clockwork | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 6.0K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-08-29 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 333 |
| 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 clockwork if
- You want the clockwork feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and clockwork 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 clockwork
Clockwork is a development tool for PHP that gives developers an insight into their application runtime — including request data, performance metrics, log entries, database queries, cache queries, redis commands, dispatched events, queued jobs and rendered views — right in the browser, and this repository contains its server side component.
read the full clockwork overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or clockwork more popular?
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars and clockwork has 5,950. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and clockwork free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and clockwork under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and clockwork?
huginn is written in Ruby and clockwork in PHP. 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 clockwork?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (49,967 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose clockwork if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.