head to head · open source
huginn vs Icinga
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars, 4,298 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Icinga has 2,237 stars, 616 forks, 496 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. huginn leads on adoption by 2,134% (49,967 vs 2,237 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; Icinga is written in C++ under GPL-3.0. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, Icinga 28%. Icinga 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 | Icinga | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 2.2K |
| License | MIT | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 616 |
| 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 Icinga if
- You want the Icinga feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and Icinga 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 Icinga
Icinga is an open source monitoring system for complex IT infrastructure. It checks the availability of network resources, notifies users of outages, and generates performance data for reporting. The project sits in the Infrastructure & Operations / Monitoring & Observability ecosystem, and Icinga 2 is the monitoring server component of the broader Icinga stack.
read the full Icinga overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or Icinga more popular?
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars and Icinga has 2,237. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and Icinga free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and Icinga under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and Icinga?
huginn is written in Ruby and Icinga in C++. 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 Icinga?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (49,967 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Icinga if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.