ELK Stack vs Fluentd
ELK Stack
elastic.coFluentd
fluentd.orgSide by side
| Figure | ELK Stack | Fluentd |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 12 | 1 |
| Spec score · Log Management Software | 9.5 (#1) | 8.5 (#26) |
| Archive export | Yes | Yes |
| Deployment | Elastic Stack is available as hosted Elastic Cloud service or self-managed software for on-premises, public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid environments. | self-hosted |
| Integrations | Elastic offers over 300 turn-key integrations for Search, Security, Observability, and cloud providers including AWS, Azure, and GCP. | Listed outputs include Elasticsearch and Kibana, Splunk, AWS S3, Kafka, BigQuery, Datadog, and OpenTelemetry. |
| Live log tailing | Yes | Yes |
| Log pipelines | Yes | Yes |
| Purpose | The Elastic Stack combines Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash to take data from any source and format for search, analysis, and visualization. | Fluentd is an open source data collector for a unified logging layer. |
| Security | Security capabilities include authentication integrations, role-based access control, SSL/TLS encryption, IP filtering, audit logging, and field- and document-level controls. | The Fluentd homepage says vulnerabilities CVE-2026-44024, CVE-2026-44025, CVE-2026-44160, and CVE-2026-44161 were patched in Fluentd v1.19.3 and advises updating fluent-package to v6.0.4. |
| Structured log parsing | Yes | Yes |
| Support | Elastic Cloud subscription tiers include varying levels of support, while paid self-managed Gold, Platinum, and Enterprise subscriptions include support. | The project lists community help and commercial support from companies offering Fluentd enterprise services. |
Plans
ELK Stack
- BasicPrice not published
- Logs EssentialsPriced on request
- Complete$0.09 a month
- Standard$99 a month
- Gold$114 a month
- Platinum$131 a month
- Enterprise$184 a month
- Basic (self-managed)Free
- Elastic Cloud hostedPriced on request
- Elastic Cloud ServerlessPriced on request
In their own words
ELK Stack
The Elastic Stack combines Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats and Logstash to bring data from different sources into search, analysis and visualization workflows. Elasticsearch is a distributed, JSON-based search and analytics engine, while Kibana provides dashboards, visualizations, live presentations and deployment management. Elastic Agent, Beats and a web crawler can ingest information from applications, infrastructure and public content. Features include alerting, machine learning, vector search, graph analytics, clustering, high availability and data lifecycle management. Elastic positions the platform for Search, Observability and Security, including centralized logging, monitoring and security analytics. It is available as hosted Elastic Cloud or as self-managed software for on-premises, public cloud, private cloud and hybrid environments. Elasticsearch and Kibana have an open source foundation, and Elasticsearch can be downloaded and started free. Elastic Cloud offers a 14-day trial without a credit card. Hosted pricing depends on deployment components and can include snapshot storage and data transfer charges; listed hosted tiers start at $99 a month.
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.