head to head · open source
huginn vs zipkin
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars, 4,298 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. zipkin has 17,461 stars, 3,098 forks, 175 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. huginn leads on adoption by 186% (49,967 vs 17,461 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; zipkin is written in Java under Apache-2.0. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, zipkin 18%. huginn was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | zipkin | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 17K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-08-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 3.1K |
| 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 zipkin if
- You want the zipkin feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and zipkin 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 zipkin
Zipkin is a distributed tracing system maintained under the OpenZipkin organization and written in Java, released under the Apache 2.0 license. It lives in the Java and JVM ecosystem as a standalone server, while its instrumentation libraries span many languages. The project gathers the timing data needed to troubleshoot latency problems in service architectures, and it covers both the collection and the lookup of that data.
read the full zipkin overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or zipkin more popular?
huginn has 49,967 GitHub stars and zipkin has 17,461. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and zipkin free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and zipkin under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and zipkin?
huginn is written in Ruby and zipkin in Java. 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 zipkin?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (49,967 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose zipkin if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.