head to head · open source
huginn vs stern
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars, 4,339 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped yesterday. stern has 4,914 stars, 180 forks, 39 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. huginn leads on adoption by 923% (50,269 vs 4,914 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; stern is written in Go under Apache-2.0. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, stern 4%. 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 | stern | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 4.9K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-25 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 180 |
| 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 stern if
- You want the stern feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and stern 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 stern
stern Fork of discontinued wercker/stern Stern allows you to tail multiple pods on Kubernetes and multiple containers within the pod. Each result is color coded for quicker debugging. The query is a regular expression or a Kubernetes resource in the form / so the pod name can easily be filtered and you don't need to specify the exact id (for instance omitting the deployment id). If a pod is deleted it gets removed from tail and if a new pod is added it automatically gets tailed. When a pod contains multiple containers Stern can tail all of them too without having to do this manually for each one. Simply specify…
read the full stern overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or stern more popular?
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars and stern has 4,914. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and stern free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and stern under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and stern?
huginn is written in Ruby and stern 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 stern?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (50,269 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose stern if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.