head to head · open source
Grafana vs huginn
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. huginn has 50,269 stars, 4,339 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 54% (77,638 vs 50,269 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; huginn is written in Ruby under MIT. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, huginn 9%. Grafana 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
| Grafana | huginn | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 50K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 4.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Grafana if
- You weight community size — 78K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick huginn if
- You want the huginn feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You evaluated both and huginn fits your workflow better
About Grafana
The open source platform for monitoring and observability Grafana allows you to query, visualize, alert on and understand your metrics no matter where they are stored. Create, explore, and share dashboards with your team and foster a data driven culture: Visualizations: Fast and flexible client side graphs with a multitude of options. Panel plugins offer many different ways to visualize metrics and logs. Dynamic Dashboards: Create dynamic & reusable dashboards with template variables that appear as dropdowns at the top of the dashboard. Explore Metrics: Explore your data through ad hoc queries and dynamic…
read the full Grafana overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or huginn more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and huginn has 50,269. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and huginn free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and huginn under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and huginn?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and huginn in Ruby. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Grafana or huginn?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose huginn if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.