head to head · open source
huginn vs nginx-lua-prometheus
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars, 4,339 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped yesterday. nginx-lua-prometheus has 1,573 stars, 239 forks, 5 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. huginn leads on adoption by 3,096% (50,269 vs 1,573 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; nginx-lua-prometheus is written in Lua under MIT. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, nginx-lua-prometheus 15%. huginn was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (monitoring), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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 | nginx-lua-prometheus | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 1.6K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | Lua |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-09-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 239 |
| 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 nginx-lua-prometheus if
- You want the nginx-lua-prometheus feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Lua
- You evaluated both and nginx-lua-prometheus 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 nginx-lua-prometheus
Prometheus metric library for Nginx This is a Lua library that can be used with Nginx to keep track of metrics and expose them on a separate web page to be pulled by Prometheus. Installation To use this library, you will need the ngx lua nginx module. You can either use a lua enabled nginx based server like OpenResty, or a regular nginx server with the module enabled: for example, on Debian 10 you can simply install libnginx mod http lua (but please read the known issues if you use a later Debian version). The library file prometheus.lua needs to be available in LUA PATH . If this is the only Lua library you…
read the full nginx-lua-prometheus overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or nginx-lua-prometheus more popular?
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars and nginx-lua-prometheus has 1,573. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and nginx-lua-prometheus free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and nginx-lua-prometheus under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and nginx-lua-prometheus?
huginn is written in Ruby and nginx-lua-prometheus in Lua. 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 nginx-lua-prometheus?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (50,269 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose nginx-lua-prometheus if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.