head to head · open source
huginn vs retina
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars, 4,339 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped yesterday. retina has 3,184 stars, 308 forks, 190 open issues and last shipped yesterday. huginn leads on adoption by 1,479% (50,269 vs 3,184 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%. retina 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 | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 308 |
| 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
What is Huginn? Huginn is a system for building agents that perform automated tasks for you online. They can read the web, watch for events, and take actions on your behalf. Huginn's Agents create and consume events, propagating them along a directed graph. Think of it as a hackable version of IFTTT or Zapier on your own server. You always know who has your data. You do. Here are some of the things that you can do with Huginn: Track the weather and get an email when it's going to rain (or snow) tomorrow ("Don't forget your umbrella!") List terms that you care about and receive email when their occurrence on…
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…
read the full retina overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or retina more popular?
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars and retina has 3,184. 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 (50,269 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose retina if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.