head to head · open source
huginn vs Nagios
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars, 4,298 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Nagios has 2,043 stars, 481 forks, 206 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. huginn leads on adoption by 2,346% (49,967 vs 2,043 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; Nagios is written in C under GPL-2.0. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, Nagios 24%. 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 | Nagios | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 2.0K |
| License | MIT | GPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | C |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-08-07 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 481 |
| 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 Nagios if
- You want the Nagios feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and Nagios 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 Nagios
Nagios is a monitoring program for hosts, services, and network resources. It is written in C and released under the GNU General Public License, version 2.0. The project belongs to the Infrastructure & Operations / Monitoring & Observability ecosystem. Nagios 4.x can check network services, monitor host resources, expose status and history through optional CGI programs, and send notifications when problems occur or are resolved.
read the full Nagios overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or Nagios more popular?
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars and Nagios has 2,043. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and Nagios free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and Nagios under GPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and Nagios?
huginn is written in Ruby and Nagios 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 Nagios?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (49,967 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Nagios if its feature set, stack or GPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.