head to head · open source
huginn vs jaeger
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars, 4,298 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. jaeger has 23,217 stars, 3,119 forks, 547 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. huginn leads on adoption by 115% (49,967 vs 23,217 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; jaeger is written in Go under Apache-2.0. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, jaeger 13%. 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.
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Side by side
| huginn | jaeger | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 23K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 3.1K |
| 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 jaeger if
- You want the jaeger feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and jaeger 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 jaeger
Jaeger is a distributed tracing platform hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), where it graduated as the 7th top level project in October 2019. It was originally created by Uber Technologies and then donated to the CNCF. The project is written in Go and released under the Apache 2.0 license, and it lives in the OpenTelemetry and observability ecosystem: it consumes traces from OpenTelemetry SDKs and reuses components from the OpenTelemetry Collector. Its repository carries topics including cncf, distributed tracing, jaeger, observability, opentelemetry and tracing, and the project is openly gove…
read the full jaeger overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or jaeger more popular?
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars and jaeger has 23,217. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and jaeger free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and jaeger under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and jaeger?
huginn is written in Ruby and jaeger in Go. 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 jaeger?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (49,967 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose jaeger if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.