head to head · open source
huginn vs lnav
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars, 4,339 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped yesterday. lnav has 10,777 stars, 414 forks, 295 open issues and last shipped yesterday. huginn leads on adoption by 366% (50,269 vs 10,777 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; lnav is written in C++ under BSD-2-Clause. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, lnav 4%. huginn was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | lnav | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 11K |
| License | MIT | BSD-2-Clause |
| Written in | Ruby | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 414 |
| 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 lnav if
- You want the lnav feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-2-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and lnav 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 lnav
This is the source repository for lnav , visit for a high level overview. LNAV The Logfile Navigator The Logfile Navigator is a log file viewer for the terminal. Given a set of files/directories, lnav will: decompress as needed; detect their format; merge the files by time into a single view; tail the files, follow renames, find new files in directories; build an index of errors and warnings; pretty print JSON lines. Then, in the lnav TUI, you can: jump quickly to the previous/next error (press e / E ); search using regular expressions (press / ); highlight text with a regular expression ( :highlight command)…
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or lnav more popular?
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars and lnav has 10,777. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and lnav free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and lnav under BSD-2-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and lnav?
huginn is written in Ruby and lnav in C++. 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 lnav?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (50,269 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose lnav if its feature set, stack or BSD-2-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.