head to head · open source
huginn vs telegraf
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars, 4,298 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. telegraf has 17,807 stars, 5,839 forks, 449 open issues and last shipped yesterday. huginn leads on adoption by 181% (49,967 vs 17,807 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; telegraf is written in Go under MIT. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, telegraf 33%. telegraf 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| huginn | telegraf | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 18K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 5.8K |
| 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 telegraf if
- You want the telegraf feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and telegraf 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 telegraf
Telegraf is a Go based, MIT licensed open source agent that collects, processes, aggregates, and writes metrics, logs, and other arbitrary data, and it is aimed at engineers who run their own monitoring and observability pipelines.
read the full telegraf overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Monitoring & Observability projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Monitoring & Observability field.
Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or telegraf more popular?
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars and telegraf has 17,807. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and telegraf free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and telegraf under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and telegraf?
huginn is written in Ruby and telegraf 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 telegraf?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (49,967 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose telegraf if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.