head to head · open source
Vector vs beyla
Vector has 22,589 GitHub stars, 2,286 forks, 2,512 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. beyla has 2,132 stars, 193 forks, 109 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Vector leads on adoption by 960% (22,589 vs 2,132 stars). Vector is written in Rust under MPL-2.0; beyla is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Vector has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, beyla 9%. beyla was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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
| Vector | beyla | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 23K | ★ 2.1K |
| License | MPL-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Rust | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.3K | ⑂ 193 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Vector if
- You weight community size — 23K stars and counting
- You want the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick beyla if
- You want the beyla feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and beyla fits your workflow better
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 →
About beyla
Beyla is a vendor agnostic, eBPF based auto instrumentation tool from Grafana that generates OpenTelemetry trace spans and Prometheus metrics for HTTP/S and gRPC services without any modification to application code or configuration, and it is aimed at platform, SRE and observability engineers who need application level telemetry from services they cannot or will not instrument by hand.
read the full beyla overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Vector or beyla more popular?
Vector has 22,589 GitHub stars and beyla has 2,132. Vector has the larger community by that measure.
Are Vector and beyla free?
Both are open source. Vector is licensed under MPL-2.0 and beyla under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Vector and beyla?
Vector is written in Rust and beyla in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Vector or beyla?
Choose Vector if you want the larger community (22,589 stars) or its MPL-2.0 licence terms. Choose beyla if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.