Consul vs etcd: What are the differences?

Consul: A tool for service discovery, monitoring and configuration. Consul is a tool for service discovery and configuration. Consul is distributed, highly available, and extremely scalable; etcd: A distributed consistent key-value store for shared configuration and service discovery. etcd is a distributed key value store that provides a reliable way to store data across a cluster of machines. It’s open-source and available on GitHub. etcd gracefully handles master elections during network partitions and will tolerate machine failure, including the master.

Consul and etcd can be primarily classified as "Open Source Service Discovery" tools.

"Great service discovery infrastructure" is the primary reason why developers consider Consul over the competitors, whereas "Service discovery" was stated as the key factor in picking etcd.

Consul and etcd are both open source tools. It seems that etcd with 25.8K GitHub stars and 5.25K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Consul with 16.4K GitHub stars and 2.85K GitHub forks.

Slack, DigitalOcean, and Rainist are some of the popular companies that use Consul, whereas etcd is used by CNCFlora, Beam, and Giant Swarm. Consul has a broader approval, being mentioned in 134 company stacks & 55 developers stacks; compared to etcd, which is listed in 27 company stacks and 11 developer stacks.