Cribl Stream vs Telegraf
Cribl Stream and Telegraf are both telemetry pipeline software. Cribl Stream is a commercial product from Cribl. Telegraf is open source under MIT, with 18k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Cribl Stream when
- Your log ingest bill is large and you want to cut, reshape or split data before it reaches expensive analytics tools.
- Pick Telegraf when
- You need to gather metrics from many kinds of systems, including industrial equipment, with one agent.
Side by side
Sits between log and metric sources and their destinations, filtering, reshaping and routing data to tools like Splunk, S3 or a SIEM.
A plugin-driven agent that collects metrics and logs from systems, databases, MQTT, Modbus, OPC UA and more, and writes them to InfluxDB, Prometheus and other outputs.
Another platform to run and license; the savings only appear if you have high volume to trim.
Configuration files for many plugins get long, and defaults lean toward InfluxDB.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Self-hosted server
Not published
Go
Closed source, sold by Cribl
Open source, MIT (permissive)
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
No Wikipedia article of its own
18k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 11 years ago, latest release v1.40.3.
Other comparisons
More telemetry collectors and pipelines
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.