Difference Between Fluentd and Logstash

To organize the workflow and coordinate teams, management tools are used. With the help of management tools, one can complete any tasks faster, track projects, manage your team, and plan for future tasks. When any device fails, what does a field engineer do? Obviously, he goes and checks out the log files and with the right application to handle the tasks, it becomes easy to seek out the problem in the device. Both Fluentd and Logstash are log collector software and are tools that are supported by Windows as well as Linux. They are different in various aspects. Let us learn about that in this article.

What is Fluentd?

Fluentd is an open-source data collector. It was developed by Treasure Data in 2011. It is written in programming languages like C and Ruby. After its installation, it runs in the background for collecting, parsing, transforming, analyzing, and storing various types of data. Also, it can be used to collect and aggregate logs in Kubernetes.

Features

• It has community-driven support.
• It has more than 650 plugins available.
• It requires very little resource system as it is written in C and Ruby language.

Advantages

• It has quite flexible and extensible parsing options.
• It supports a wide array of input formats.
• It supports the Apache version 2.0 license.

Disadvantages

• It does not support multithreading.
• It is highly and only recommended to use while running small applications.
• The performance of speed is affected as it is written in C but the plugin framework is written in Ruby.

What is Logstash?

Logstash allows the user to collect data from a variety of sources, transform it and then send the result to the desired location. It was developed in 2016 by Jordan Sissel. It is written in Java and Ruby language. It is one of the ELT tools. It can be used when complex pipelines are handling multiple data formats.

Features

• It is highly extensible as it can create and configure the pipeline according to the user.
• It has fully secure ingest pipelines.
• It centrally manages deployments with a single User Interface.

Advantages

• It provides good and clear documentation.
• It is quite flexible because of the presence of a number of plugins.
• It is a great tool for prototyping.

Disadvantages

• It is quite slower in terms of performance in comparison with its alternatives.
• It has no support for the enterprise.

Fluentd vs Logstash

Below are the differences between Fluentd and Logstash:

Features	Fluentd	Logstash
Developed	Fluentd is written and developed in CRuby.	Logstash is written and developed in JRuby.
Language	It is written in CRuby and there is no need for Java runtime dependencies.	It is written in JRuby and does not require Java runtime on the host machine.
Multithreading	It does not support multithreading.	It supports Multithreading.
Platform	It became available for windows after 2015.	It runs on Windows and Linux both.
Enterprise Support	It has the full support of the enterprise.	It has no support from the enterprise.
Plugins, Parsers, and in-reliability	It has a decentralized repository and does not host all the plugins under one single repository. It is having support for almost 500 plugins with support offered for in-built reliability.	It has a single centralized repository where all the plugins are managed. There are limited plugins available in Logstash with no support for in-built reliability. It has approx 200 plugins.
Event Routing	It uses Tagging Approach. This approach is quite easy to use than conditional statements.	It uses if-then-else statements. This approach is a little difficult to use.
Memory Consumption	It is memory efficient. It is highly recommended to use while running small applications.	It consumes more memory than Fluentd. Using a small number of machines will not make much difference in the memory consumption of both the tools but if a large amount of machines is used, then it is clearly visible that Logstash is taking 3 times more memory than Fluentd.

Conclusion

Fluentd is a good choice if you’re looking for vendor neutrality. One can opt for Fluentd over Logstash because it gives the ability to route, gives more simplified solutions, and has a wide range of plugins available. Both tools have their own features, pros, and cons. Now, it is all up to the choice of the user to choose which tool depending on their requirements.