head to head · open source
huginn vs Pulse
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars, 4,298 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Pulse has 7,217 stars, 376 forks, 46 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. huginn leads on adoption by 592% (49,967 vs 7,217 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; Pulse is written in Swift under MIT. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, Pulse 5%. 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 | Pulse | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 7.2K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | Swift |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-08-15 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 376 |
| 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 Pulse if
- You want the Pulse feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Swift
- You evaluated both and Pulse 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 Pulse
Pulse is an MIT licensed Swift logging framework for Apple platforms that records logs and URLSession network requests inside iOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS, and visionOS apps, then displays them through SwiftUI views so developers and QA teams can inspect and share them directly from the device.
read the full Pulse overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or Pulse more popular?
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars and Pulse has 7,217. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and Pulse free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and Pulse under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and Pulse?
huginn is written in Ruby and Pulse in Swift. 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 Pulse?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (49,967 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Pulse if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.