head to head · open source
huginn vs Vector
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars, 4,298 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Vector has 22,579 stars, 2,286 forks, 2,512 open issues and last shipped yesterday. huginn leads on adoption by 121% (49,967 vs 22,579 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; Vector is written in Rust under MPL-2.0. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, Vector 10%. Vector was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (agent, 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 | Vector | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 23K |
| License | MIT | MPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 2.3K |
| 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 Vector if
- You want the Vector feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and Vector 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 Vector
Vector is an open source observability data pipeline written in Rust and licensed under MPL 2.0. It operates as an end to end system for collecting, transforming, and routing logs and metrics within the cloud native monitoring ecosystem. The project is maintained by Datadog's Community Open Source Engineering team, and its topics include agent, cloud native, data transformation, datadog, etl, events, forwarder, logs, metrics, and monitoring.
read the full Vector overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or Vector more popular?
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars and Vector has 22,579. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and Vector free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and Vector under MPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and Vector?
huginn is written in Ruby and Vector in Rust. 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 Vector?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (49,967 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Vector if its feature set, stack or MPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.