head to head · open source
huginn vs pinpoint
huginn has 49,976 GitHub stars, 4,299 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped yesterday. pinpoint has 13,872 stars, 3,749 forks, 543 open issues and last shipped yesterday. huginn leads on adoption by 260% (49,976 vs 13,872 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; pinpoint is written in Java under Apache-2.0. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, pinpoint 27%. huginn 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 | pinpoint | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 14K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 3.7K |
| 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 pinpoint if
- You want the pinpoint 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 pinpoint 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 pinpoint
Pinpoint is an open source Application Performance Management (APM) tool built for large scale distributed systems. It is written primarily in Java and also supports applications written in PHP and Python through a separate agent repository. Inspired by Google's Dapper, it provides a way to analyze the overall structure of a system and how the components inside it are interconnected by tracing transactions across distributed applications. The project lives in the Java ecosystem, is licensed under Apache 2.0, and has been developed for around twelve years, with its current stable release being v3.1.0.…
read the full pinpoint overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or pinpoint more popular?
huginn has 49,976 GitHub stars and pinpoint has 13,872. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and pinpoint free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and pinpoint under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and pinpoint?
huginn is written in Ruby and pinpoint 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 pinpoint?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (49,976 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose pinpoint if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.