head to head · open source
huginn vs subtrace
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars, 4,339 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped yesterday. subtrace has 3,103 stars, 88 forks, 15 open issues and last shipped 9 months ago. huginn leads on adoption by 1,520% (50,269 vs 3,103 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; subtrace is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, subtrace 3%. huginn 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 | subtrace | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 3.1K |
| License | MIT | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Ruby | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-01-28 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 88 |
| 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 subtrace if
- You want the subtrace feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and subtrace 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 subtrace
Subtrace Inspect HTTP requests in any server with just a single command. Linux macOS Currently in private beta. Join the waitlist if you primarily use macOS for development! Resources Docs Discord Guides Docker Docker Compose Kubernetes Quickstart
read the full subtrace overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or subtrace more popular?
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars and subtrace has 3,103. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and subtrace free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and subtrace under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and subtrace?
huginn is written in Ruby and subtrace 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 subtrace?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (50,269 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose subtrace if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.