head to head · open source
huginn vs node_exporter
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars, 4,298 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. node_exporter has 13,785 stars, 2,710 forks, 314 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. huginn leads on adoption by 262% (49,967 vs 13,785 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; node_exporter is written in Go under Apache-2.0. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, node_exporter 20%. 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 | node_exporter | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 14K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 2.7K |
| 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 node_exporter if
- You want the node_exporter feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and node_exporter 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 node_exporter
Node exporter is a Prometheus exporter for hardware and OS metrics exposed by \ NIX kernels. It is written in Go and ships with pluggable metric collectors, so the set of measurements it gathers can be tuned per host rather than fixed at build time. The project lives in the Prometheus ecosystem, is published under the Apache 2.0 license, and has been developed for roughly thirteen years, with the repository showing 13,782 stars and 2,708 forks at the time of writing.
read the full node_exporter overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or node_exporter more popular?
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars and node_exporter has 13,785. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and node_exporter free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and node_exporter under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and node_exporter?
huginn is written in Ruby and node_exporter in Go. 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 node_exporter?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (49,967 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose node_exporter if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.