head to head · open source
huginn vs magic-trace
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars, 4,298 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. magic-trace has 6,270 stars, 209 forks, 70 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. huginn leads on adoption by 697% (49,967 vs 6,270 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 | 2026-09-16 | 2026-08-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 209 |
| 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
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 magic-trace
magic trace is an open source tracing tool, written in OCaml and released under the MIT license, that collects and displays high resolution traces of what a process is doing. It lives in the Linux performance tooling ecosystem and sits alongside perf , which it uses under the hood to drive Intel Processor Trace. Rather than sampling call stacks throughout time, magic trace snapshots a ring buffer of all control flow leading up to a chosen point in time, then renders an interactive timeline of call stacks going back a configurable span of roughly 10ms, at approximately 40ns resolution.
read the full magic-trace overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or magic-trace more popular?
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars and magic-trace has 6,270. 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 (49,967 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose magic-trace if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.