head to head · open source
huginn vs opentelemetry-collector
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars, 4,298 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. opentelemetry-collector has 7,564 stars, 2,249 forks, 696 open issues and last shipped yesterday. huginn leads on adoption by 561% (49,967 vs 7,564 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; opentelemetry-collector is written in Go under Apache-2.0. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, opentelemetry-collector 30%. opentelemetry-collector 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 | opentelemetry-collector | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 7.6K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 2.2K |
| 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 opentelemetry-collector if
- You want the opentelemetry-collector 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 opentelemetry-collector 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 opentelemetry-collector
The OpenTelemetry Collector is a vendor agnostic, Apache 2.0 licensed telemetry agent and collector, written in Go, that receives, processes and exports telemetry data for teams running observability pipelines and distributed systems.
read the full opentelemetry-collector overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or opentelemetry-collector more popular?
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars and opentelemetry-collector has 7,564. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and opentelemetry-collector free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and opentelemetry-collector under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and opentelemetry-collector?
huginn is written in Ruby and opentelemetry-collector 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 opentelemetry-collector?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (49,967 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose opentelemetry-collector if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.