head to head · open source
huginn vs ngxtop
huginn has 49,969 GitHub stars, 4,299 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped today. ngxtop has 6,525 stars, 472 forks, 62 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. huginn leads on adoption by 666% (49,969 vs 6,525 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 | 2026-09-18 | 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
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 ngxtop
ngxtop is a command line tool that parses an nginx access log and prints top like, real time metrics about what a server is serving at that moment, built for engineers who need to troubleshoot or watch a live nginx instance without standing up a monitoring stack.
read the full ngxtop overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or ngxtop more popular?
huginn has 49,969 GitHub stars and ngxtop has 6,525. 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 (49,969 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose ngxtop if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.