head to head · open source
huginn vs Zabbix
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars, 4,339 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Zabbix has 6,529 stars, 1,275 forks, 108 open issues and last shipped yesterday. huginn leads on adoption by 670% (50,269 vs 6,529 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; Zabbix is written in Go Template under AGPL-3.0. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, Zabbix 20%. Zabbix 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 | Zabbix | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 6.5K |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | Go Template |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 1.3K |
| 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 Zabbix if
- You want the Zabbix feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go Template
- You evaluated both and Zabbix 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 Zabbix
An enterprise class, open source distributed monitoring solution that’s designed to monitor the performance and availability of network devices, servers, services, and other IT resources. Zabbix is a flexible solution that can monitor anything from a simple, standalone application to a large scale environment, with features including: Resource discovery: Discover network entities, server resources, and onboard/offboard devices. Use out of the box integrations (templates) to monitor anything form a low level device to a SAAS service. Metric acquisition: Use an agent or agent less approach for metric acquisition…
read the full Zabbix overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or Zabbix more popular?
huginn has 50,269 GitHub stars and Zabbix has 6,529. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and Zabbix free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and Zabbix under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and Zabbix?
huginn is written in Ruby and Zabbix in Go Template. 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 Zabbix?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (50,269 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Zabbix if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.