head to head · open source
huginn vs magic-trace
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars, 4,339 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped yesterday. magic-trace has 6,345 stars, 222 forks, 70 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. huginn leads on adoption by 692% (50,269 vs 6,345 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; magic-trace is written in OCaml under MIT. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, magic-trace 3%. 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 | magic-trace | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 6.3K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | OCaml |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 222 |
| 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 magic-trace if
- You want the magic-trace feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches OCaml
- You evaluated both and magic-trace 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 magic-trace
magic trace Overview magic trace collects and displays high resolution traces of what a process is doing. People have used it to: figure out why an application running in production handles some requests slowly while simultaneously handling a sea of uninteresting requests, look at what their code is actually doing instead of what they think it's doing, get a history of what their application was doing before it crashed, instead of a mere stacktrace at that final instant, ...and much more! magic trace: has 2% 10% overhead, doesn't require application changes to use, traces every function call with 40ns…
read the full magic-trace overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or magic-trace more popular?
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars and magic-trace has 6,345. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and magic-trace free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and magic-trace under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and magic-trace?
huginn is written in Ruby and magic-trace in OCaml. 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 magic-trace?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (50,269 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose magic-trace if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.