head to head · open source
huginn vs RedELK
huginn has 49,969 GitHub stars, 4,299 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped yesterday. RedELK has 2,670 stars, 391 forks, 13 open issues and last shipped yesterday. huginn leads on adoption by 1,771% (49,969 vs 2,670 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; RedELK is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, RedELK 15%. RedELK 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 | RedELK | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 2.7K |
| License | MIT | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Ruby | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 391 |
| 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 RedELK if
- You want the RedELK feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and RedELK 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 RedELK
RedELK is a red team's SIEM — an Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana based system that collects operational logs from red team teamservers and traffic logs from redirectors into one enriched central location, built for red team operators and for the white teams that need oversight of long running engagements.
read the full RedELK overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or RedELK more popular?
huginn has 49,969 GitHub stars and RedELK has 2,670. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and RedELK free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and RedELK under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and RedELK?
huginn is written in Ruby and RedELK 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 RedELK?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (49,969 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose RedELK if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.