head to head · open source
huginn vs ngxtop
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars, 4,339 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped yesterday. ngxtop has 6,521 stars, 472 forks, 62 open issues and last shipped 8 months ago. huginn leads on adoption by 671% (50,269 vs 6,521 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; ngxtop is written in Python under MIT. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, ngxtop 7%. 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 | ngxtop | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 6.5K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-03-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 472 |
| 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 ngxtop if
- You want the ngxtop feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and ngxtop 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 ngxtop
================================================================ ngxtop real time metrics for nginx server (and others) ================================================================ ngxtop parses your nginx access log and outputs useful, top like, metrics of your nginx server. So you can tell what is happening with your server in real time. ngxtop is designed to run in a short period time just like the top command for troubleshooting and monitoring your Nginx server at the moment. If you need a long running monitoring process or storing your webserver stats in external monitoring / graphing system, you can…
read the full ngxtop overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or ngxtop more popular?
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars and ngxtop has 6,521. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and ngxtop free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and ngxtop under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and ngxtop?
huginn is written in Ruby and ngxtop in Python. 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 ngxtop?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (50,269 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose ngxtop if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.