head to head · open source
huginn vs Zabbix
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars, 4,298 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Zabbix has 6,382 stars, 1,259 forks, 108 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. huginn leads on adoption by 683% (49,967 vs 6,382 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%. 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 | Zabbix | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 6.4K |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | Go Template |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-16 |
| 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
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 Zabbix
Zabbix is an enterprise class, open source distributed monitoring solution that measures the performance and availability of network devices, servers, services, and other IT resources. The project lives in the open source infrastructure monitoring and observability ecosystem, and its source is distributed under the AGPL 3.0 only license, with the repository carrying 6,374 stars and 1,255 forks. It is written using Go Template and is hosted by the Zabbix project at zabbix.com, where the download and documentation entry points are published. The stated scope runs from a simple standalone application through to a la…
read the full Zabbix overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or Zabbix more popular?
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars and Zabbix has 6,382. 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 (49,967 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Zabbix if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.