head to head · open source
cilium vs Vector
cilium has 25,232 GitHub stars, 4,071 forks, 1,085 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Vector has 22,579 stars, 2,286 forks, 2,512 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cilium leads on adoption by 12% (25,232 vs 22,579 stars). cilium is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Vector is written in Rust under MPL-2.0. cilium has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, Vector 10%. Vector was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (monitoring), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| cilium | Vector | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 25K | ★ 23K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.1K | ⑂ 2.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick cilium if
- You weight community size — 25K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Vector if
- You want the Vector feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and Vector fits your workflow better
About cilium
Cilium is a networking, observability, and security solution built on an eBPF based dataplane, written in Go and licensed under Apache 2.0. It lives in the Kubernetes ecosystem as a CNI implementation, and it is a CNCF project. At its foundation is eBPF, a Linux kernel technology that allows dynamic insertion of bytecode at integration points such as network IO, application sockets, and tracepoints, which is where Cilium implements its networking, security, and visibility logic. The project provides a flat Layer 3 network that can span multiple clusters in either native routing or overlay mode, and it is L7 proto…
read the full cilium overview →
About Vector
Vector is an open source observability data pipeline written in Rust and licensed under MPL 2.0. It operates as an end to end system for collecting, transforming, and routing logs and metrics within the cloud native monitoring ecosystem. The project is maintained by Datadog's Community Open Source Engineering team, and its topics include agent, cloud native, data transformation, datadog, etl, events, forwarder, logs, metrics, and monitoring.
read the full Vector overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is cilium or Vector more popular?
cilium has 25,232 GitHub stars and Vector has 22,579. cilium has the larger community by that measure.
Are cilium and Vector free?
Both are open source. cilium is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Vector under MPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cilium and Vector?
cilium is written in Go and Vector in Rust. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, cilium or Vector?
Choose cilium if you want the larger community (25,232 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Vector if its feature set, stack or MPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.