Huginn

Huginn is a system of agents that monitor and act on your behalf. It is named after one of Odin’s two ravens, the one whose name means thought, who flies out each day and reports back what he has seen.

That is a fair description of what it does: agents watch sources, pass events between each other, and act when something matches.

Why it is on this list

There are three reasons, in order.

It is MIT-licensed and run by its community. No company stands behind it, so there is no licence that can be changed and no enterprise tier to be pushed toward. This site argues that durability comes from governance more than from licence text, and Huginn is the clearest example: nobody owns it, so nobody can take it away.

It is written in Rails, the same stack as Redmine and as most of what we build. That gives one deployment story, one set of skills and one Ruby version policy across the estate, which for us is a real operational saving.

Its model also suits watching problems better than a flow canvas does. Node-RED is event-driven glue: something arrives, so do this. Huginn is built around agents that go and look. They poll a feed, scrape a page or run a query on a schedule, and emit an event when the result changes. Every organisation has both kinds of problem, and they call for different tools.

Where we use it

For things that have no webhook: a supplier’s status page, a regulatory publication, a certificate expiry, a price, a competitor’s changelog, or a directory that should have received a file by 09:00 and did not. Events go into Redmine as issues or out by email. The agents are configured as JSON, which we keep in your repository.

Where it falls short

The interface shows its age, and development is steady rather than fast. The agent library is smaller than Node-RED’s collection of nodes, and a few agents assume services that have changed since they were written.

It also needs someone who can operate a Rails application. That is a real responsibility, though we are already carrying it if you run Redmine.

For most clients we recommend Node-RED for glue and add Huginn only when watching is the main problem. We would rather run one tool than two and will tell you so.