head to head · open source
huginn vs kube-state-metrics
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars, 4,298 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. kube-state-metrics has 6,204 stars, 2,194 forks, 109 open issues and last shipped yesterday. huginn leads on adoption by 705% (49,967 vs 6,204 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; kube-state-metrics is written in Go under Apache-2.0. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, kube-state-metrics 35%. kube-state-metrics 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| huginn | kube-state-metrics | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 6.2K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 2.2K |
| 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 kube-state-metrics if
- You want the kube-state-metrics 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 kube-state-metrics 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 kube-state-metrics
kube state metrics is an Apache 2.0 add on agent for Kubernetes that listens to the Kubernetes API server and exposes metrics about the state of cluster objects, built for platform teams and operators who run Prometheus based monitoring.
read the full kube-state-metrics overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Monitoring & Observability projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Monitoring & Observability field.
Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or kube-state-metrics more popular?
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars and kube-state-metrics has 6,204. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and kube-state-metrics free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and kube-state-metrics under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and kube-state-metrics?
huginn is written in Ruby and kube-state-metrics 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 kube-state-metrics?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (49,967 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose kube-state-metrics if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.