collectd vs Process Exporter
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
Not the right match-up?
collectd
Lightweight system statistics collection daemon
VS
Process Exporter
Prometheus exporter for per-process metrics
| Feature | collectd | Process Exporter |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Language | C | Go |
| Setup difficulty | Medium | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 32 MB | 64 MB |
| Deployment | bare-metal, binary | docker, binary |
| GitHub stars | ★ 3,366 | ★ 2,137 |
| First released | 2005 | 2016 |
| Replaces | Datadog Agent | Datadog Agent |
Why pick each one
Choose Process Exporter if…
- Released under the MIT license
- First-class Docker support for quick deployment
- Active community (2.1k GitHub stars)
- Written in Go
Frequently asked questions
Is collectd or Process Exporter better?
Neither is universally better. collectd has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are collectd and Process Exporter free and open-source?
Yes. collectd is licensed under MIT and Process Exporter under MIT. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run collectd and Process Exporter with Docker?
collectd: check the project docs for container support. Process Exporter: yes.