Fluentd vs Logstash

Overview

Logstash

Stacks12.3K

Followers8.8K

Votes103

GitHub Stars14.7K

Forks3.5K

Fluentd

Stacks630

Followers688

Votes39

GitHub Stars13.4K

Forks1.4K

Fluentd vs Logstash: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Fluentd and Logstash

Ease of Use: Fluentd provides a more intuitive and user-friendly interface compared to Logstash. It offers a simpler configuration syntax, making it easier for users to set up and manage their log collection and forwarding processes. On the other hand, Logstash has a steeper learning curve with a more complex configuration language, which requires users to have a deeper understanding of its internal workings.
Extensibility: Fluentd allows for easy extensibility through its plugin ecosystem. It provides a wide range of plugins that can be used to enhance its functionality, such as input/output plugins for various data sources/destinations and filter plugins for data processing. In contrast, Logstash has a smaller plugin ecosystem and may require custom development for specific functionality not available out-of-the-box.
Scalability: Fluentd is known for its lightweight and scalable architecture. It is designed to handle a large volume of log data, making it suitable for distributed environments. Logstash, on the other hand, is known to consume more system resources and may have limitations in handling high-throughput scenarios. It may require additional resources and optimizations to scale effectively.
Performance: Fluentd is generally considered to have better performance compared to Logstash. It achieves this by utilizing a more efficient event buffering mechanism and a multi-threaded architecture, enabling it to process log data faster. Logstash, although also capable of handling large volumes of log data, may experience performance bottlenecks, especially when dealing with complex data transformations and heavy computational tasks.
Community Support: Fluentd has a larger and more active community compared to Logstash. This means that there is a wider pool of resources, documentation, and community-driven plugins available for Fluentd, which can be beneficial for users seeking help or looking for specific features. Logstash, while still well-supported, may have a smaller community and a fewer number of available resources.

In summary, Fluentd provides an easier-to-use interface, better extensibility through plugins, superior scalability and performance, and a larger community support compared to Logstash.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Detailed Comparison

Logstash	Fluentd
Logstash is a tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect logs, parse them, and store them for later use (like, for searching). If you store them in Elasticsearch, you can view and analyze them with Kibana.	Fluentd collects events from various data sources and writes them to files, RDBMS, NoSQL, IaaS, SaaS, Hadoop and so on. Fluentd helps you unify your logging infrastructure.
Centralize data processing of all types;Normalize varying schema and formats;Quickly extend to custom log formats;Easily add plugins for custom data source	Open source; Flexible; Minimum resources; Reliable
Statistics
GitHub Stars 14.7K	GitHub Stars 13.4K
GitHub Forks 3.5K	GitHub Forks 1.4K
Stacks 12.3K	Stacks 630
Followers 8.8K	Followers 688
Votes 103	Votes 39
Pros & Cons
Pros 69 Free 18 Easy but powerful filtering 12 Scalable 2 Kibana provides machine learning based analytics to log 1 Great to meet GDPR goals Cons 4 Memory-intensive 1 Documentation difficult to use	Pros 11 Open-source 10 Great for Kubernetes node container log forwarding 9 Lightweight 9 Easy
Integrations
Kibana Elasticsearch Beats	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Logstash, Fluentd?

Papertrail

Papertrail helps detect, resolve, and avoid infrastructure problems using log messages. Papertrail's practicality comes from our own experience as sysadmins, developers, and entrepreneurs.

Logmatic

Get a clear overview of what is happening across your distributed environments, and spot the needle in the haystack in no time. Build dynamic analyses and identify improvements for your software, your user experience and your business.

Loggly

It is a SaaS solution to manage your log data. There is nothing to install and updates are automatically applied to your Loggly subdomain.

Logentries

Logentries makes machine-generated log data easily accessible to IT operations, development, and business analysis teams of all sizes. With the broadest platform support and an open API, Logentries brings the value of log-level data to any system, to any team member, and to a community of more than 25,000 worldwide users.

Graylog

Centralize and aggregate all your log files for 100% visibility. Use our powerful query language to search through terabytes of log data to discover and analyze important information.

Sematext

Sematext pulls together performance monitoring, logs, user experience and synthetic monitoring that tools organizations need to troubleshoot performance issues faster.

ELK

It is the acronym for three open source projects: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. Elasticsearch is a search and analytics engine. Logstash is a server‑side data processing pipeline that ingests data from multiple sources simultaneously, transforms it, and then sends it to a "stash" like Elasticsearch. Kibana lets users visualize data with charts and graphs in Elasticsearch.

Sumo Logic

Cloud-based machine data analytics platform that enables companies to proactively identify availability and performance issues in their infrastructure, improve their security posture and enhance application rollouts. Companies using Sumo Logic reduce their mean-time-to-resolution by 50% and can save hundreds of thousands of dollars, annually. Customers include Netflix, Medallia, Orange, and GoGo Inflight.

Splunk

It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.

LogDNA

The easiest log management system you will ever use! LogDNA is a cloud-based log management system that allows engineering and devops to aggregate all system and application logs into one efficient platform. Save, store, tail and search app

Related Comparisons

Fluentd vs Logstash: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Fluentd and Logstash

Ease of Use: Fluentd provides a more intuitive and user-friendly interface compared to Logstash. It offers a simpler configuration syntax, making it easier for users to set up and manage their log collection and forwarding processes. On the other hand, Logstash has a steeper learning curve with a more complex configuration language, which requires users to have a deeper understanding of its internal workings.
Extensibility: Fluentd allows for easy extensibility through its plugin ecosystem. It provides a wide range of plugins that can be used to enhance its functionality, such as input/output plugins for various data sources/destinations and filter plugins for data processing. In contrast, Logstash has a smaller plugin ecosystem and may require custom development for specific functionality not available out-of-the-box.
Scalability: Fluentd is known for its lightweight and scalable architecture. It is designed to handle a large volume of log data, making it suitable for distributed environments. Logstash, on the other hand, is known to consume more system resources and may have limitations in handling high-throughput scenarios. It may require additional resources and optimizations to scale effectively.
Performance: Fluentd is generally considered to have better performance compared to Logstash. It achieves this by utilizing a more efficient event buffering mechanism and a multi-threaded architecture, enabling it to process log data faster. Logstash, although also capable of handling large volumes of log data, may experience performance bottlenecks, especially when dealing with complex data transformations and heavy computational tasks.
Community Support: Fluentd has a larger and more active community compared to Logstash. This means that there is a wider pool of resources, documentation, and community-driven plugins available for Fluentd, which can be beneficial for users seeking help or looking for specific features. Logstash, while still well-supported, may have a smaller community and a fewer number of available resources.

In summary, Fluentd provides an easier-to-use interface, better extensibility through plugins, superior scalability and performance, and a larger community support compared to Logstash.

Fluentd vs Logstash

Overview

Fluentd vs Logstash: What are the differences?