head to head · open source
huginn vs cost-xray
huginn has 49,969 GitHub stars, 4,299 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cost-xray has 2,046 stars, 202 forks, 13 open issues and last shipped 18 days ago. huginn leads on adoption by 2,342% (49,969 vs 2,046 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; cost-xray is written in Python under MIT. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, cost-xray 10%. 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.
← all 13541 open source comparisons
Side by side
| huginn | cost-xray | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 2.0K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 202 |
| 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 cost-xray if
- You want the cost-xray feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and cost-xray 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 cost-xray
cost xray is an MIT licensed open source observability proxy for Claude Code and Codex that captures the API traffic those agents actually send and attributes every token and dollar back to the system prompts, tool schemas, MCP blocks, tool results, cache reads and writes, and thinking blocks that produced them.
read the full cost-xray overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Monitoring & Observability projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Monitoring & Observability field.
Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or cost-xray more popular?
huginn has 49,969 GitHub stars and cost-xray has 2,046. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and cost-xray free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and cost-xray under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and cost-xray?
huginn is written in Ruby and cost-xray in Python. 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 cost-xray?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (49,969 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose cost-xray if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.