head to head · open source
huginn vs kapacitor
huginn has 49,969 GitHub stars, 4,299 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kapacitor has 2,377 stars, 479 forks, 834 open issues and last shipped yesterday. huginn leads on adoption by 2,002% (49,969 vs 2,377 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; kapacitor is written in Go under MIT. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, kapacitor 20%. 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 | kapacitor | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 2.4K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 479 |
| 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 kapacitor if
- You want the kapacitor feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and kapacitor 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 kapacitor
Kapacitor is an open source, MIT licensed framework written in Go for processing, monitoring, and alerting on time series data, built for operators and platform engineers who store metrics in InfluxDB and need rule based stream and batch processing on top of them.
read the full kapacitor overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or kapacitor more popular?
huginn has 49,969 GitHub stars and kapacitor has 2,377. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and kapacitor free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and kapacitor under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and kapacitor?
huginn is written in Ruby and kapacitor 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 kapacitor?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (49,969 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose kapacitor if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.