head to head · open source
Grafana vs huginn
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars, 14,749 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. huginn has 49,967 stars, 4,298 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 54% (76,791 vs 49,967 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Grafana | huginn | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 50K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 4.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Grafana if
- You weight community size — 77K 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
Grafana is an open source observability platform for visualizing metrics, logs, and traces across diverse data sources. It runs in the infrastructure and operations ecosystem, designed for teams needing unified visibility into system behavior without vendor lock in. Built with TypeScript and Go, it provides a composable architecture that integrates with existing toolchains.
read the full Grafana overview →
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 →
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 Grafana or huginn more popular?
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars and huginn has 49,967. 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 (76,791 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose huginn if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.