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Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf

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Re: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf

#21

Post by PatrolX »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #14
PatrolX wrote: post #5

Not just an alternative though. - Self-hosted - Unlimited and FREE vs $699 / month - Create your own agents / integrations - Process data through shell scripts or JavaScript - Better filtering - Liquid templating - Completely private I save thousands of dollars by using Huginn. It's incredibly powerful and quite frankly I don't trust Zapier with my data and visibility of what I'm doing because there are commercial im…

> I save thousands of dollars by using Huginn. Does that take into account the overhead of operating Huginn?

Yes, and it's running thousands of requests and posts / minute on AWS. But you don't even need to put it in the cloud, it runs perfectly at home on an old box running Ubuntu.

Re: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf

#22

Post by mcbits »

esquire_900 wrote: post #11

This, as well as related projects like n8n & node-red, is a very cool project. I always wonder what people use it for in real life though. It seems a lot of trouble (setting up, learning curve, maintaining) for an action that usually takes a couple of seconds, like checking the weather or opening twitter. Does anybody have useful workflows going on?

Ever notice when someone criticizes a company on HN, and suddenly the CEO shows up and engages after 6 months of inactivity? Likely they are using a tool like this along with Google Alerts, etc, to monitor sites for mentions of the company and maybe flag negative sentiment. Also, same thing but for politics.

Re: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf

#23

Post by traspler »

I have been running huginn on my home server for a while. I've mainly used it to filter RSS feeds and then generate new feeds with the filtered items. Another use-case for me is ingesting webcomic RSS feeds (or scrape a page) and post the comics to a private Telegram channel. Once I also had an agent scraping a page and notifying me if something changed (realestate listing).

I have tried a couple alternatives, e.g. node-red but none really worked the way I wanted them to for these cases. huginn is incredibly flexible and (at least for me) the mental model of it's workflow makes a lot of sense. Sadly more and more pages want you to go through their app/site and make it a bit difficult to work with, e.g. getting content from an instagram account.

One thing I have not figured out about huginn and which all of these automation tools seem to lack are loops. E.g I have page an agent scrapes, from which I want to output the src of an image tag but I also want to check if a certain condition on the page matches (e.g. a "next page" button exists) and then firstly output the found src but then also re-invoke the agent with a new input element. So it would scrape the next page and so on until it does not find the button anymore.

Re: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf

#24

Post by elcomet »

esquire_900 wrote: post #11

This, as well as related projects like n8n & node-red, is a very cool project. I always wonder what people use it for in real life though. It seems a lot of trouble (setting up, learning curve, maintaining) for an action that usually takes a couple of seconds, like checking the weather or opening twitter. Does anybody have useful workflows going on?

I do use node-red in real life.

Basically for two things: - Transform rss feeds into instant messages (this way I receive new comics I follow on my phone for example)

- Create simple bots

This way I avoid creating scripts every time and managing a new webserver and stuff, all my small scripts are in one place.

Re: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf

#25

Post by organsnyder »

soared wrote: post #20

I would not market this as an alternative to Zapier since it goes after a different market. The type of people who use Zapier will see a link to github.com and not even consider it. I think this should be positioned more like "A high powered Zapier for technical users" or something similar.

"Self-hosted" is a growing buzzword these days (for many good reasons, IMHO).

Re: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf

#26

Post by [deleted] »

soared wrote: post #20

I would not market this as an alternative to Zapier since it goes after a different market. The type of people who use Zapier will see a link to github.com and not even consider it. I think this should be positioned more like "A high powered Zapier for technical users" or something similar.

[deleted]

Re: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf

#27

Post by toomuchtodo »

howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #13

Zapier has exponentially more integrations than this or anything else, but is surprisingly difficult to use, and more so since they updated their UI. Editing Zaps is pure torture because refresh is so difficult. Exception handling is pure pain. In most instances the breadth of API calls is so narrow, and so rarely updated by vendors that you end up switching to a custom integration. I've also noticed vendors rapidly…

> The "retail" integration space remains underserved and if one of the enterprise players decided to go down-market with a better UI and deeper integrations - they'd mop the floor clean in 18 months.

I think it's a tough market to be "winner" of. Novices are going to want a stupid simple GUI ("wizard mode", as someone else in thread mentioned). Power users are going to want to be able to toss in some code at some point in a workflow to do some fancy ETL you don't support out of the box. When you hit a certain level of complexity, an edge case or integration an automation product doesn't support, or perhaps even an amount of spend that you start looking at annually as painful, it's likely you consider pulling all of your workflows out and have a software engineer build something bespoke for your business line.

Re: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf

#28

Post by caseysoftware »

It's not quite 1:1 but not a bad comparison.

I like to think of Zapier as "wizard mode" - if you're doing something within their pattern, planned workflow, capabilities, etc it is a great option.

If you need to do something more advanced or outside that narrow scope, you need to go to the APIs (or Huginn) itself.

The important questions are: How many people need to get into advanced mode? How big of an effort/skill/understanding jump is it to go there? (aka will it hurt too much to switch?)

Re: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf

#29

Post by agentdrtran »

rvz wrote: post #4

For those using expensive/advanced connectors like Zapier, Tray.io, etc. I find that https://n8n.io serves as a far welcoming open-source alternative that is worth looking at.

This is nowhere near as robust as Zapier and has significant limitations.
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