Vector can act as a Splunk forwarder, but is designed to be much more flexible.
In addition to forwarding to more storage systems (S3, Elasticsearch, syslog, etc), Vector can do things like sampling logs, parsing them, and aggregating them into metrics. Depending on your needs, this makes it easier to reduce your Splunk volume and reduce costs, transition to something like an ELK stack, etc.
We're also working to build up the metrics side of Vector's capabilities. In a way, you can think of Vector as a stream processing system for observability data, capable of feeding into a variety of storage backends.
