Cribl Stream vs Fluentd

Cribl Stream processes machine data such as logs, instrumentation, application data and metrics in real time, then delivers it to an analysis platform. It can add external context, redact, obfuscate or encrypt sensitive fields, and optimize data for performance and cost requirements. Pipelines built from Functions transform incoming events, while Routes direct events to Pipelines and Destinations. Cribl says Stream connects to more than 80 data sources and destinations and supports Cribl Packs for integrations. The Copilot Editor accepts plain-language prompts to help build and refine pipelines, transform and enrich data, filter noise, and route telemetry. Stream can run on Cribl-managed cloud infrastructure or on customer infrastructure, Kubernetes Pods or containers. The Free plan costs nothing and supports up to 1TB per day, unlimited Pipelines and Routes, and Community Support; the on-prem Free license requires sending anonymized telemetry to Cribl. Standard and Enterprise are billed by credits used at ingest, with no prices listed. Cribl was founded in 2018.

Fluentd is a free, open-source data collector for creating a unified logging layer. It uses JSON to handle log collection, filtering, buffering, and output across sources and destinations. More than 500 community plugins connect it to data sources and outputs, including Elasticsearch and Kibana, Splunk, AWS S3, Kafka, BigQuery, Datadog, and OpenTelemetry. It supports memory and file buffering, failover, and high availability to help prevent data loss between nodes. The project reports that a vanilla instance uses 30–40 MB of memory and can process 13,000 events per second per core. Fluentd v1 runs on Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows; community distributions also include Docker images, a Kubernetes DaemonSet, and Ruby gems. It is self-hosted, and its components are available under the Apache 2 License. The project lists community help and commercial support from companies offering enterprise services. The homepage notes vulnerabilities patched in Fluentd v1.19.3 and advises updating fluent-package to v6.0.4.