Huginn vs Microsoft Power Automate
Huginn and Microsoft Power Automate are both workflow automation software. Huginn is open source under MIT, with 50k GitHub stars. Microsoft Power Automate is a commercial product from Microsoft.
Which to pick
- Pick Huginn when
- You want IFTTT-style monitoring and automations on your own server and are comfortable with Rails.
- Pick Microsoft Power Automate when
- A Microsoft 365 organisation wants approvals and automations around SharePoint, Outlook and Teams.
Side by side
A self-hosted automation system where agents watch websites, feeds and APIs, and react by sending notifications or calling other services.
Microsoft's workflow automation with cloud flows across connectors, desktop RPA and approvals inside Microsoft 365.
The UI is dated, and building agents takes JSON configuration rather than a visual editor.
Premium connectors and RPA need extra licences, and error handling is clumsy.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server
Cloud service and desktop app
Ruby, Rails, PostgreSQL and MySQL
Not published
Open source, MIT (permissive)
Closed source, sold by Microsoft
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
50k GitHub stars
483 Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 13 years ago, latest release v2026.11.01.
Not known
Other comparisons
More workflow automation tools
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.