head to head · open source
huginn vs cortex
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars, 4,339 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cortex has 5,877 stars, 882 forks, 343 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. huginn leads on adoption by 755% (50,269 vs 5,877 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; cortex is written in Go under Apache-2.0. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, cortex 15%. huginn 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 | cortex | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 5.9K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 882 |
| 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 cortex if
- You want the cortex 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 cortex 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 cortex
Cortex Cortex is a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi tenant, long term storage solution for Prometheus and OpenTelemetry Metrics. Features Horizontally scalable: Cortex can run across multiple machines in a cluster, exceeding the throughput and storage of a single machine. Highly available: When run in a cluster, Cortex can replicate data between machines. Multi tenant: Cortex can isolate data and queries from multiple different independent Prometheus sources in a single cluster. Long term storage: Cortex supports S3, GCS, Swift and Microsoft Azure for long term storage of metric data. Documentation…
read the full cortex overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or cortex more popular?
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars and cortex has 5,877. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and cortex free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and cortex under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and cortex?
huginn is written in Ruby and cortex 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 cortex?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (50,269 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose cortex if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.