Huginn

Open SourceMITSelf-hostable

Your own army of software agents — monitor websites, track prices, watch feeds and chain reactions together on a server you control. The hacker's IFTTT since 2013.

Open source alternative to

Zapier

IFTTT

Visit Huginn View source

About Huginn

Huginn predates the modern automation wave — since 2013 it has let people build 'agents' that watch the world and react: scrape a page for changes, track a price, monitor a feed, detect a keyword on social media, then email you, post a webhook or trigger another agent.

Its event-graph model is genuinely powerful: agents emit events other agents consume, so sophisticated monitoring pipelines grow out of simple building blocks. The Website Agent alone — point it at any page with CSS selectors — replaces a shelf of paid scraping tools.

It shows its age: the Rails UI is utilitarian, setup takes real effort, and development has slowed to maintenance pace. But nothing self-hosted matches its watch-the-web flexibility per dollar (that dollar being zero — it's MIT licensed), which is why 49k+ stars keep it a fixture of every homelab list.

Key features

Agents that watch anything — Website changes, RSS, email, weather, social keywords — dozens of agent types out of the box.
Chainable event graph — Agents emit events other agents consume — build monitoring pipelines from simple blocks.
Web scraping built in — The Website Agent extracts data from any page with CSS selectors, on your schedule.
Fully private — MIT-licensed and self-hosted — your monitors, credentials and data never touch a third party.

How to install Huginn

The honest read

What we like

Unmatched flexibility for web monitoring and scraping
12 years of community recipes and agent types
MIT license — free forever, no tiers
Runs on a small VPS or Raspberry Pi
Event-chaining enables genuinely complex pipelines

Worth knowing

Dated Rails UI and developer-grade setup
Maintenance-mode pace — few new integrations
No modern SaaS connector library
JSON-based agent configuration is unforgiving

FAQ

Is Huginn still maintained?

Yes, at a maintenance pace — dependencies and fixes land steadily, though major new features are rare. The core has been production-stable for years.

What's Huginn best at?

Watching things: page changes, prices, feeds, keywords — then chaining reactions. For SaaS-to-SaaS business automation, n8n or Activepieces are better fits.

Is Huginn hard to set up?

It's the most involved tool in this space — a Rails app with MySQL/Postgres, best run via the official Docker image. Budget an afternoon and it then runs for years.

Is Huginn free?

Completely — MIT-licensed open source with no paid edition at all.