Sazabi vs Vector: An Open-Source Pipeline and a Place to Investigate

Prices and facts checked on vendor pages on Nov 8, 2026.

Vector is an open-source data pipeline that collects, transforms and routes telemetry. Sazabi is AI-native observability and security: it takes the logs, finds the problems and explains them. If you are weighing the two, you are likely deciding whether to keep a Vector layer in front of a backend, or what backend to point it at. Sazabi wrote this page. Vector facts come from vector.dev and Datadog's open source hub, checked November 8, 2026.

At a Glance

How Vector Works and Charges

Vector's site calls it a tool for building observability pipelines. You describe sources, transforms and sinks in a YAML, TOML or JSON file, and Vector ships as a single binary. The docs describe three deployment roles: a daemon that collects everything on a host, a sidecar paired with one service, and an aggregator that does cross-host work centrally. Transforms use Vector Remap Language (VRL), for tasks such as parsing JSON or redacting sensitive fields.

There is no pricing page because there is nothing to buy. Vector's license-change note says the project moved to the Mozilla Public License 2.0, a weak copyleft license. Datadog's open source hub says Datadog maintains Vector and that it powers Datadog Observability Pipelines. The cost of Vector is the machines it runs on and the engineering time to write configs, upgrade versions and handle backpressure. Vector's homepage showed version 0.61.0 on the day we checked, so it is still a 0.x project.

Vector has an OpenTelemetry sink that sends OTLP over HTTP. Its docs label the sink beta, list at-least-once delivery with acknowledgements, and say it accepts events that already conform to the OTel protobuf format, which you can prepare with a Remap transform. The docs also warn that batching works only with the otlp codec and that the JSON codec does not produce a valid OTLP request body. Buffers can be memory (the default) or disk, and a full buffer can block or drop the newest events.

Nothing in the pages above describes search, dashboards, alerting or retention. Vector is a pipeline and expects a destination.

How Sazabi Works and Charges

Sazabi is the destination. Logs go to one intake URL, and Sazabi watches them for problems nobody wrote a rule for. It opens an issue with the supporting records, investigates root cause, and posts it to Slack or Linear. You can ask questions in plain language, search logs and build dashboards, and your coding agent can take the root cause over MCP, CLI or API. It also scans connected repositories for vulnerabilities.

Pricing is per 30-day cycle: Hobby $50, Startup $200, Growth $1,000, each with 200 GB ingested, 50 GB scanned, 20 issues and 500 AI credits. Beyond that, $0.10 per GB ingested, $0.10 per GB scanned, $4 per issue and $0.01 per AI credit. Retention is 7, 30 or 90 days. See Sazabi pricing.

Key Differences for a Log-Centered Team

Cost sits in different places. Vector costs nothing to license, but every pipeline behavior is yours to build and maintain. Sazabi charges for ingest, scans and issues, and runs the storage and investigation for you.

Who watches the pipeline. A Vector deployment is a system you run, so its health, upgrades and buffer settings become your team's job. With Sazabi, the service itself is operated for you, and BYOC keeps log storage in your AWS account if you need it.

Metrics. Vector handles logs, metrics and traces. Sazabi's Vector source accepts logs and traces but not metrics, so metric data goes through an OpenTelemetry Collector instead.

Maturity of the link. Vector's OTel sink is labeled beta, and Sazabi's guide needs Vector 0.51.0 or later. Pin versions and test upgrades.

Compliance. Vector is software you run, so compliance depends on where you run it. Sazabi holds SOC 2 Type II, SOC 1, ISO 27001 and ISO 27017 certifications. Anyone who signs an NDA, customer or not, can request the SOC 2 Type II report and ISO 27001 audit reports from the Sazabi Trust Center. HIPAA safeguards are available on select plans.

When to Pick Vector

• You want an open-source pipeline you control, with no license fee.
• You send data to several destinations and need to route, sample or redact it on your own network.
• You have engineers who will own configs, upgrades and capacity.
• You want to avoid tying your collection layer to any one observability vendor.

When to Pick Sazabi

• You need somewhere to search, alert on and investigate logs, not another hop.
• You want issues surfaced and explained without writing monitors.
• You want a coding agent to receive the root cause.
• You would rather pay a plan price than operate infrastructure.

You can also use both. Vector in front, Sazabi behind, is a reasonable design.

Trying Sazabi Alongside Vector

Sazabi's Vector guide covers this path, and the Vector integration page lists the capabilities. The sink looks like this:

sinks:
  sazabi_logs:
    type: opentelemetry
    inputs: ['sazabi_logs_otlp']
    protocol:
      type: http
      uri: 'https://<your intake host>/v1/logs'
      method: post
      encoding:
        codec: otlp

The sazabi_logs_otlp input is a Remap transform that wraps each event in an OTLP resourceLogs envelope. The guide includes it, and the otlp codec does not build that envelope for you. Point the transform at explicit sources rather than a wildcard, so Vector's internal metrics are not forwarded. If records arrive malformed, check that the sink reads from the transform and not the raw source.

Send one service for a week. Check what Sazabi surfaced, what you had to configure, and how your Sazabi bill compares with the cost of whatever you run on the other side. For a managed pipeline, see Sazabi vs Cribl, and for general OpenTelemetry setups see OpenTelemetry.