head to head · open source
NetData vs huginn
NetData has 80,561 GitHub stars, 6,630 forks, 393 open issues and last shipped yesterday. huginn has 49,967 stars, 4,298 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. NetData leads on adoption by 61% (80,561 vs 49,967 stars). NetData is written in Go under GPL-3.0; huginn is written in Ruby under MIT. NetData has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, huginn 9%. NetData 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
| NetData | huginn | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 81K | ★ 50K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.6K | ⑂ 4.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick NetData if
- You weight community size — 81K stars and counting
- You want the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick huginn if
- You want the huginn feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You evaluated both and huginn fits your workflow better
About NetData
Netdata is an open source, real time infrastructure monitoring platform written in Go and released under GPL 3.0, built for operators and lean teams who need per second visibility across Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, and Windows systems.
read the full NetData overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is NetData or huginn more popular?
NetData has 80,561 GitHub stars and huginn has 49,967. NetData has the larger community by that measure.
Are NetData and huginn free?
Both are open source. NetData is licensed under GPL-3.0 and huginn under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between NetData and huginn?
NetData is written in Go and huginn in Ruby. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, NetData or huginn?
Choose NetData if you want the larger community (80,561 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose huginn if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.