Huginn: Self-Hosted Automation Agent System

Huginn is a system for building agents that perform automated tasks online — monitoring websites for changes, scraping data, triggering alerts, sending notifications, and chaining actions together into complex workflows. With over 48,000 GitHub stars, Huginn is a unique open-source tool that combines web scraping, data processing, and event-driven automation through a visual agent graph. Think of it as a self-hosted IFTTT with programmable logic.

Self-hosting Huginn means your automation agents run 24/7 on your own server, monitoring and acting on your behalf without sending your data through any third-party service.

Key Features

• Agent-based architecture where each agent performs a specific task in a pipeline
• Web scraping agents for monitoring pages, extracting data, and detecting changes
• Event-driven triggers with scheduling, webhooks, and conditional logic
• Email, Slack, Pushover, and webhook notification agents for multi-channel alerts
• Data transformation agents for parsing, filtering, and reformatting content
• Visual agent graph showing data flow and dependencies between agents
• Scenario import/export for sharing and backing up agent configurations
• RSS feed generation from any scraped or processed data source

Why Self-Host Huginn?

Unlimited monitoring and scraping. Cloud automation services limit the number of checks, the frequency of polling, and the volume of data you can process. Self-hosted Huginn runs as many agents as your server can handle, checking as frequently as every minute.

Private data pipelines. When your agents scrape websites, process emails, or monitor social feeds, all that data flows through your server — not through a third-party API. This is essential for agents that handle sensitive or proprietary information.

Programmable logic. Unlike simple if-this-then-that services, Huginn agents can perform complex data transformations, conditional branching, and multi-step processing. Agents can feed data to other agents, creating sophisticated automated pipelines.

Always-on reliability. Huginn runs on your VPS continuously, so time-sensitive agents — like price drop alerts, stock monitors, or availability checkers — never miss an event because a cloud service had an outage or rate-limited your account.

System Requirements

Resource	Minimum	Recommended
CPU	1 vCPU	2+ vCPUs
RAM	1 GB	2 GB
Storage	10 GB SSD	20 GB SSD
OS	Ubuntu 22.04+	Ubuntu 24.04

Huginn runs on Ruby on Rails with a MySQL or PostgreSQL database. Resource usage scales with the number of active agents and their polling frequency. A moderate setup with 50-100 agents runs comfortably on 2 GB RAM.

Getting Started

The fastest way to deploy Huginn on your VPS is with Docker Compose through Dokploy. Our step-by-step deployment guide walks you through the full setup, including persistent storage, environment configuration, and SSL.

Deploy Huginn with Dokploy →

Alternatives

• n8n — Visual workflow automation platform with 400+ integrations and a drag-and-drop editor
• Activepieces — Open-source automation platform with a modern interface and growing connector library
• Node-RED — Flow-based programming tool for IoT and event-driven automation
• ChangeDetection.io — Website change detection and monitoring tool with notification alerts

FAQ

How is Huginn different from n8n or Zapier? Huginn is agent-based rather than workflow-based. Instead of connecting apps in a linear flow, you create autonomous agents that independently monitor, process, and act on data. Agents can form complex directed graphs. Huginn excels at web scraping and monitoring use cases where n8n and Zapier focus more on app-to-app integration.

Can Huginn scrape dynamic JavaScript-rendered pages? Huginn's built-in web agents work with static HTML content. For JavaScript-rendered pages, you can use a headless browser agent or integrate with a service like Browserless. Some community agents add Selenium or Playwright support for dynamic content.

How many agents can Huginn handle? A well-configured Huginn instance on a 2 GB RAM VPS can run several hundred agents without issues. Performance depends on how frequently agents poll and how much data they process. Heavy scraping agents consume more resources than simple RSS monitors.

Is Huginn still actively maintained? Huginn has a stable codebase with a dedicated community. While the pace of new features has slowed compared to its early years, the project receives regular maintenance updates and has a large library of built-in agent types that cover most automation needs.

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App data sourced from selfh.st open-source directory.