Elastic Agent vs Fluent Bit

Elastic Agent collects logs, metrics, traces, availability, security, and other host data through one agent. Fleet supplies a web interface for centrally adding and managing agents and integrations, and can distribute upgrades and policies across thousands of agents at runtime. Administrators can track agent status, configuration, overhead, processes, and versions. Elastic Agent and Fleet include dashboards, visualizations, and ingest pipelines for popular services and platforms, with more than 300 ready-to-use integrations listed across search, security, observability, and cloud providers. Packages are provided for Linux, Windows, and macOS architectures and include a separate otelcol binary for OpenTelemetry Collector components. Elastic describes use across infrastructure, applications, and mobile-device telemetry. Elastic Cloud offers a free 14-day trial with one hosted deployment and three Serverless projects. Trial hosted deployments are limited to one active deployment, 4 GB RAM per availability zone for Elasticsearch data nodes, and up to two availability zones. Elastic directs users to documentation and its community forum for assistance. Paid tiers listed are Standard at $99 a month, Gold at $114 a month, Platinum at $131 a month, and Enterprise at $184 a month.

Fluent Bit is a free, open-source telemetry agent for collecting and processing logs, metrics, and traces. It can run as an edge agent on constrained systems or as a central collector for cloud infrastructure, and is designed for high throughput with low resource consumption. Built-in parsers cover JSON, Regex, LTSV, and Logfmt; metrics compatibility includes Prometheus and OpenTelemetry. More than 100 built-in plugins cover inputs, filters, analytics, and outputs, with destinations including Splunk, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, and Kafka. Buffering in memory or on the file system and backpressure handling support data flow, while network input and output plugins include TLS and SSL. Stream processing supports SQL queries, aggregation windows, forecasting, and data analysis. Users can write plugins in C, Lua, Golang, or WebAssembly. The Open-source Fluent Bit plan costs nothing, with self-hosted deployment under the Apache License 2.0. Official packages and installation guidance cover Linux, macOS, Windows, containers, and selected BSD and IBM Z Linux environments.