Blackbox Exporter 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 | Blackbox Exporter | Vigil |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 84 · Excellent | 71 · Good |
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MPL-2.0 |
| Language | Go | Rust |
| Setup difficulty | Easy | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 32 MB | 32 MB |
| Deployment | docker, kubernetes, binary | docker, binary |
| GitHub stars | ★ 5,882 | ★ 1,948 |
| First released | 2016 | 2018 |
| Replaces | Pingdom | Statuspage, Pingdom |
What are Blackbox Exporter and Vigil?
Blackbox Exporter
The Blackbox Exporter allows Prometheus to probe endpoints over HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, TCP, ICMP, and gRPC. It is the standard way to perform black-box availability and latency monitoring with Prometheus.
- HTTP, TCP, DNS, ICMP probes
- TLS certificate checks
- Prometheus integration
- Multi-target probing
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
Blackbox Exporter vs Vigil: key differences
Blackbox Exporter is written in Go, while Vigil is built with Rust. Licensing differs — Apache-2.0 for Blackbox Exporter versus MPL-2.0 for Vigil. Blackbox Exporter is the more established project (first released 2016), while Vigil arrived in 2018. Blackbox Exporter has the considerably larger community, at 5,882 GitHub stars versus 1,948.
Why pick each one
Choose Blackbox Exporter if…
- Simple uptime monitoring
- Tiny footprint
Watch out for
- Needs Prometheus to be useful
- No standalone UI
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 Blackbox Exporter or Vigil better?
Blackbox Exporter is the stronger all-round pick: it has both the larger community and the simpler easy setup. Consider Vigil if its specific feature set fits your needs better.
Are Blackbox Exporter and Vigil free and open-source?
Yes. Blackbox Exporter is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Vigil under MPL-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Blackbox Exporter and Vigil with Docker?
Blackbox Exporter: yes. Vigil: yes.