head to head · open source
huginn vs pg_activity
huginn has 49,969 GitHub stars, 4,299 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped yesterday. pg_activity has 3,038 stars, 190 forks, 16 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. huginn leads on adoption by 1,545% (49,969 vs 3,038 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; pg_activity is written in Python under PostgreSQL. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, pg_activity 6%. 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 | pg_activity | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 3.0K |
| License | MIT | PostgreSQL |
| Written in | Ruby | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-08-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 190 |
| 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 pg_activity if
- You want the pg_activity feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the PostgreSQL license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and pg_activity 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 pg_activity
pg activity is a top like command line tool for PostgreSQL server activity monitoring, built for database administrators, on call engineers, and developers who need real time visibility into what queries and sessions a PostgreSQL instance is running.
read the full pg_activity overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or pg_activity more popular?
huginn has 49,969 GitHub stars and pg_activity has 3,038. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and pg_activity free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and pg_activity under PostgreSQL. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and pg_activity?
huginn is written in Ruby and pg_activity 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 pg_activity?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (49,969 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose pg_activity if its feature set, stack or PostgreSQL licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.