Fluentd & Fluent Bit

The Production Grade Telemetry Ecosystem

Telemetry data processing in general can be complex, and at scale a bit more, that's why Fluentd was born. Fluentd has become more than a simple tool, it has grown into a fullscale 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

• Graduated Hosted projects by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)

• Production Grade solutions: deployed million of times every single day.

• Vendor neutral and community driven projects

• Widely Adopted by the Industry: trusted by all major companies like AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud and hundreds of others.

Both projects share a lot of similarities, Fluent Bit is fully designed and built on top of the best ideas of Fluentd architecture and general design. Choosing which one to use depends on the end-user needs.

The following table describes a comparison of different areas of the projects:

	Fluentd	Fluent Bit
Scope	Containers / Servers	Embedded Linux / Containers / Servers
Language	C & Ruby	C
Memory	> 60MB	~1MB
Performance	Medium 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 external plugins are available	More than 100 built-in plugins are available
License	Apache License v2.0	Apache License v2.0

Both Fluentd and Fluent Bit can work as Aggregators or Forwarders, they both can complement each other or use them as standalone solutions. In the recent years, Cloud Providers switched from Fluentd to Fluent Bit for performance and compatibility reasons. Fluent Bit is now considered the next generation solution.