Cribl Stream vs Vector
Cribl Stream and Vector are both telemetry pipeline software. Cribl Stream is a commercial product from Cribl. Vector is open source under MPL-2.0, with 23k 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 Vector when
- You need a fast, single-binary agent or aggregator to reshape and ship telemetry, for example to cut observability costs.
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 Rust observability pipeline that collects, transforms and routes logs, metrics and traces between many sources and destinations.
Another platform to run and license; the savings only appear if you have high volume to trim.
Owned by Datadog and still pre-1.0 in version numbering.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Self-hosted server and command line
Not published
Rust and Tokio
Closed source, sold by Cribl
Open source, MPL-2.0 (weak copyleft)
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
You can use it inside a product you sell; changes you make to its own files must be shared.
No Wikipedia article of its own
23k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 8 years ago, latest release v0.61.0.
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.