The Production Grade Ecosystem
Logging and data processing in general can be complex, and substantially more so at scale. That's why Fluentd was born. Now, Fluentd is more than a simple tool. It's a full ecosystem that contains SDKs for different languages and sub projects like Fluent Bit.
On this page, we will describe the relationship between the Fluentd and Fluent Bit open source projects. As a summary, we can say both are:
Licensed under the terms of Apache License v2.0
Hosted projects by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)
Production Grade solutions: deployed thousands of times every single day, millions per month.
Community driven projects
Widely Adopted by the Industry: trusted by all major companies like AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud and hundred of others.
Originally created by Treasure Data.
Both projects have a lot of similarities. Fluent Bit is fully designed and built on top of the best ideas of the Fluentd architecture and general design. Choosing which one to use depends on the end-user needs.
The following table describes a comparison in different areas of the projects:
Both Fluentd and Fluent Bit can work as Aggregators or Forwarders. They can both complement each other or be used as standalone solutions.
Fluentd
Fluent Bit
Scope
Containers / Servers
Embedded Linux / Containers / Servers
Language
C & Ruby
C
Memory
~40MB
~650KB
Performance
High Performance
High Performance
Dependencies
Built as a Ruby Gem, it requires a certain number of gems.
Zero dependencies, unless some special plugin requires them.
Plugins
More than 1000 plugins available
Around 70 plugins available
License