head to head · open source
huginn vs NLog
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars, 4,339 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped yesterday. NLog has 6,546 stars, 1,377 forks, 50 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. huginn leads on adoption by 668% (50,269 vs 6,546 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; NLog is written in C# under BSD-3-Clause. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, NLog 21%. 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 | NLog | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 6.5K |
| License | MIT | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Ruby | C# |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 1.4K |
| 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 NLog if
- You want the NLog feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches C#
- You evaluated both and NLog 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 NLog
NLog is a free logging platform for .NET with rich log routing and management capabilities. It makes it easy to produce and manage high quality logs for your application regardless of its size or complexity. Handles both structured logging and traditional logging from any .NET language, augment with contextual information, format according to your preference and send them to one or more targets such as file or console. Major and minor releases will be posted on project news. Getting started .NET Framework ASP.NET Core .NET Core Console For the possible options in the config, check the Options list and API…
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or NLog more popular?
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars and NLog has 6,546. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and NLog free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and NLog under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and NLog?
huginn is written in Ruby and NLog 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 NLog?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (50,269 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose NLog if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.