head to head · open source
huginn vs thanos
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars, 4,339 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped yesterday. thanos has 14,266 stars, 2,404 forks, 908 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. huginn leads on adoption by 252% (50,269 vs 14,266 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; thanos is written in Go under Apache-2.0. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, thanos 17%. 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 | thanos | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 14K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 2.4K |
| 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 thanos if
- You want the thanos 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 thanos 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 thanos
📢 ThanosCon happened on 19th March 2024 as a co located half day on KubeCon EU in Paris. Overview Thanos is a set of components that can be composed into a highly available metric system with unlimited storage capacity, which can be added seamlessly on top of existing Prometheus deployments. Thanos is a CNCF Incubating project. Thanos leverages the Prometheus 2.0 storage format to cost efficiently store historical metric data in any object storage while retaining fast query latencies. Additionally, it provides a global query view across all Prometheus installations and can merge data from Prometheus HA pairs on…
read the full thanos overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or thanos more popular?
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars and thanos has 14,266. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and thanos free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and thanos under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and thanos?
huginn is written in Ruby and thanos 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 thanos?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (50,269 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose thanos if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.