head to head · open source
huginn vs lnav
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars, 4,298 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. lnav has 10,675 stars, 403 forks, 295 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. huginn leads on adoption by 368% (49,967 vs 10,675 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 | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 403 |
| 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
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 lnav
lnav is a log file viewer for the terminal that decompresses, detects the format of, merges, indexes and queries log files in one interactive text interface, built for developers, system administrators and support engineers who diagnose systems from the command line.
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or lnav more popular?
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars and lnav has 10,675. 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 (49,967 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose lnav if its feature set, stack or BSD-2-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.