Datadog Observability Pipelines vs Fluentd
Datadog Observability Pipelines
datadoghq.comFluentd
fluentd.orgSide by side
| Figure | Datadog Observability Pipelines | Fluentd |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.10/mo | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 1 |
| Spec score · Telemetry Pipeline Software | 6.8 (#26) | 8.2 (#10) |
| Founded | 2010 | 2011 |
Plans
Datadog Observability Pipelines
- Ingested GB$0.10 a month
- Ingested GB On-Demand$0.12 a month
- vCPUPriced on request
In their own words
Datadog Observability Pipelines
Datadog Observability Pipelines has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
Fluentd
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.