head to head · open source
Vector vs yokai
Vector has 22,589 GitHub stars, 2,286 forks, 2,512 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. yokai has 842 stars, 32 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. Vector leads on adoption by 2,583% (22,589 vs 842 stars). Vector is written in Rust under MPL-2.0; yokai is written in Go under MIT. Vector has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, yokai 4%. Vector was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (metrics), 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
| Vector | yokai | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 23K | ★ 842 |
| License | MPL-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Rust | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-07-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.3K | ⑂ 32 |
| 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 yokai if
- You want the yokai feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and yokai 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 yokai
Yokai is a simple, modular, and observable Go framework for backend applications, aimed at Go engineers who want production grade logging, tracing, metrics, and dependency injection without writing the wiring boilerplate themselves.
read the full yokai overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Vector or yokai more popular?
Vector has 22,589 GitHub stars and yokai has 842. Vector has the larger community by that measure.
Are Vector and yokai free?
Both are open source. Vector is licensed under MPL-2.0 and yokai under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Vector and yokai?
Vector is written in Rust and yokai 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 yokai?
Choose Vector if you want the larger community (22,589 stars) or its MPL-2.0 licence terms. Choose yokai if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.