head to head · open source
huginn vs cortex
huginn has 49,969 GitHub stars, 4,299 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped today. cortex has 5,863 stars, 877 forks, 343 open issues and last shipped today. huginn leads on adoption by 752% (49,969 vs 5,863 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%. cortex 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 | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 877 |
| 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
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 cortex
Cortex is a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi tenant, long term storage backend for Prometheus and OpenTelemetry Metrics, aimed at platform and observability teams whose metrics workload has outgrown a single Prometheus server.
read the full cortex overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or cortex more popular?
huginn has 49,969 GitHub stars and cortex has 5,863. 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 (49,969 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose cortex if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.