head to head · open source
huginn vs jmx_exporter
huginn has 49,969 GitHub stars, 4,299 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped yesterday. jmx_exporter has 3,329 stars, 1,226 forks, 12 open issues and last shipped yesterday. huginn leads on adoption by 1,401% (49,969 vs 3,329 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 | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-18 |
| 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
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 jmx_exporter
jmx exporter is a Java collector published under the Prometheus organisation that reads JMX MBean values and turns them into metrics Prometheus can consume, aimed at Java operators and Prometheus users who need visibility into JVM and application internals that are exposed only over JMX.
read the full jmx_exporter overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or jmx_exporter more popular?
huginn has 49,969 GitHub stars and jmx_exporter has 3,329. 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 (49,969 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.