Cloudprober vs Vigil
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
| Feature | Cloudprober | Vigil |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 81 · Excellent | 71 · Good |
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MPL-2.0 |
| Language | Go | Rust |
| Setup difficulty | Medium | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 128 MB | 32 MB |
| Deployment | docker, kubernetes, binary | docker, binary |
| GitHub stars | ★ 704 | ★ 1,948 |
| First released | 2017 | 2018 |
| Replaces | Pingdom, Catchpoint | Statuspage, Pingdom |
What are Cloudprober and Vigil?
Cloudprober
Cloudprober is an active monitoring tool that runs probes against your services to measure availability and latency from an external perspective. It auto-discovers targets, exports Prometheus metrics, and supports HTTP, ping, DNS, gRPC, and UDP probes.
- Black-box probing for many protocols
- Automatic target discovery
- Native Prometheus metrics
- Low memory footprint
Vigil
Vigil is a microservices status page that monitors distributed infrastructure and reports outages. It can probe HTTP, TCP, and ICMP endpoints and includes a local Prober for push-based reporting.
- Status page and monitoring
- HTTP, TCP, ICMP probes
- Push reporting with Vigil Reporter
- Alerts to Slack and email
Cloudprober vs Vigil: key differences
Cloudprober is written in Go, while Vigil is built with Rust. Licensing differs — Apache-2.0 for Cloudprober versus MPL-2.0 for Vigil. Vigil is the lighter option, starting around 32 MB of RAM against 128 MB for Cloudprober. Vigil has the considerably larger community, at 1,948 GitHub stars versus 704.
Why pick each one
Choose Cloudprober if…
- Cloud-native target discovery
- Single static binary
Watch out for
- YAML configuration required
- No bundled dashboard
Choose Vigil if…
- Very low resource use
- Combines checks and status page
Watch out for
- Configuration via TOML files
- Smaller community
Frequently asked questions
Is Cloudprober or Vigil better?
Neither is universally better. Vigil has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are Cloudprober and Vigil free and open-source?
Yes. Cloudprober is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Vigil under MPL-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Cloudprober and Vigil with Docker?
Cloudprober: yes. Vigil: yes.
Which is lighter on resources, Cloudprober or Vigil?
Vigil has the smaller minimum footprint at 32 MB of RAM, compared to about 128 MB for Cloudprober. Real-world usage depends on library size, user count, and enabled features.