Telegraf vs Vector
Telegraf and Vector are both telemetry pipeline software. Telegraf is open source under MIT, with 18k GitHub stars. Vector is open source under MPL-2.0, with 23k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Telegraf when
- You need to gather metrics from many kinds of systems, including industrial equipment, with one agent.
- 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
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.
A Rust observability pipeline that collects, transforms and routes logs, metrics and traces between many sources and destinations.
Configuration files for many plugins get long, and defaults lean toward InfluxDB.
Owned by Datadog and still pre-1.0 in version numbering.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server
Self-hosted server and command line
Go
Rust and Tokio
Open source, MIT (permissive)
Open source, MPL-2.0 (weak copyleft)
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
You can use it inside a product you sell; changes you make to its own files must be shared.
18k GitHub stars
23k GitHub stars
Established: started 11 years ago, latest release v1.40.3.
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 each project's README and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.