head to head · open source
huginn vs retina
huginn has 49,969 GitHub stars, 4,299 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped today. retina has 3,173 stars, 304 forks, 190 open issues and last shipped yesterday. huginn leads on adoption by 1,475% (49,969 vs 3,173 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; retina is written in Go under MIT. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, retina 10%. 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 | retina | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 3.2K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 304 |
| 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 retina if
- You want the retina feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and retina 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 retina
[![goreport][goreport img]][goreport] ![GitHub release][release img] [![retina publish][godoc badge]][godoc] ![license] [![retina test][retina test image badge]][retina test image] [![retinash][retinash badge]][retinash] [![retina publish][retina publish badge]][retina publish] ![retina codeql img][retina codeql badge] ![retina golangci lint img][retina golangci lint badge] Overview Retina is a cloud agnostic, open source Kubernetes network observability platform that provides a centralized hub for monitoring application health, network health, and security . It provides actionable insights to cluster network adm…
read the full retina overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or retina more popular?
huginn has 49,969 GitHub stars and retina has 3,173. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and retina free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and retina under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and retina?
huginn is written in Ruby and retina 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 retina?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (49,969 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose retina if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.