head to head · open source
huginn vs jmx_exporter
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars, 4,339 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped yesterday. jmx_exporter has 3,334 stars, 1,226 forks, 12 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. huginn leads on adoption by 1,408% (50,269 vs 3,334 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; jmx_exporter is written in Java under Apache-2.0. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, jmx_exporter 37%. huginn 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 | jmx_exporter | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 3.3K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | Java |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-31 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| 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 jmx_exporter if
- You want the jmx_exporter feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and jmx_exporter 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 jmx_exporter
JMX Exporter The JMX Exporter is a collector to capture JMX MBean values. Documentation Documentation can be found at JMX Exporter on prometheus.github.io Contributing and community See CONTRIBUTING.md and the community section of the Prometheus homepage. The Prometheus Java community is present on the CNCF Slack on prometheus java , and we have a fortnightly community call in the Prometheus public calendar. License Apache License 2.0, see LICENSE.
read the full jmx_exporter overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or jmx_exporter more popular?
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars and jmx_exporter has 3,334. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and jmx_exporter free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and jmx_exporter under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and jmx_exporter?
huginn is written in Ruby and jmx_exporter in Java. 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 jmx_exporter?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (50,269 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose jmx_exporter if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.