head to head · open source
huginn vs kapacitor
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars, 4,339 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kapacitor has 2,378 stars, 475 forks, 834 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. huginn leads on adoption by 2,014% (50,269 vs 2,378 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 | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 475 |
| 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
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 kapacitor
Kapacitor Open source framework for processing, monitoring, and alerting on time series data Installation Kapacitor has two binaries: kapacitor – a CLI program for calling the Kapacitor API. kapacitord – the Kapacitor server daemon. You can either download the binaries directly from the downloads page or go get them: Configuration An example configuration file can be found here Kapacitor can also provide an example config for you using this command: Getting Started This README gives you a high level overview of what Kapacitor is and what its like to use it. As well as some details of how it works. To get started…
read the full kapacitor overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or kapacitor more popular?
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars and kapacitor has 2,378. 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 (50,269 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose kapacitor if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.