head to head · open source
huginn vs effect
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars, 4,339 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped yesterday. effect has 17,464 stars, 892 forks, 253 open issues and last shipped yesterday. huginn leads on adoption by 188% (50,269 vs 17,464 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; effect is written in TypeScript under MIT. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, effect 5%. effect 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 | effect | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 17K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 892 |
| 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 effect if
- You want the effect feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and effect 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 effect
Effect Effect is a library for building robust, maintainable, type safe, and production grade applications in TypeScript. It helps you handle the hard problems at scale: typed errors, dependency injection, structured concurrency, scheduling, tracing, and unified schema validation. Effect V4 is currently a release candidate. The main branch contains v4 development. Install V4 RC Requirements TypeScript 5.9 or newer. TypeScript 7 is recommended for the best performance and compatibility with Effect's TypeScript tooling. Node.js 18 or newer is the general minimum for running Effect on Node.js. Some integration…
read the full effect overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or effect more popular?
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars and effect has 17,464. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and effect free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and effect under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and effect?
huginn is written in Ruby and effect in TypeScript. 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 effect?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (50,269 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose effect if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.