Fluentd vs Google Cloud Logging
Fluentd
fluentd.org
Google Cloud Logging
cloud.google.comSide by side
| Figure | Fluentd | Google Cloud Logging |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $0.01/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 13 |
| Spec score · Log Management Software | 8.5 (#26) | 9.5 (#2) |
| Archive export | Yes | Yes |
| Deployment options | self-hosted | cloud |
| Integrations | Listed outputs include Elasticsearch and Kibana, Splunk, AWS S3, Kafka, BigQuery, Datadog, and OpenTelemetry. | Official integrations include Cloud Monitoring, Error Reporting, Cloud Trace, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage and BigQuery. |
| Live log tailing | Yes | Yes |
| Log pipelines | Yes | Yes |
| Purpose | Fluentd is an open source data collector for a unified logging layer. | Cloud Logging is a fully managed, real-time log management service for storage, search, analysis, and alerting at exabyte scale. |
| Support | The project lists community help and commercial support from companies offering Fluentd enterprise services. | The product page directs customers who need help getting started to contact sales. |
Plans
Google Cloud Logging
- Logging storage (non-vended network logs)$0.50, paid once
- Vended network logs storage$0.25, paid once
- Logging retention beyond default period$0.01 a month
- Free allotmentFree
- Log AnalyticsFree
- Log RouterFree
- Logs RouterFree
- Extended retention$0.01 a month
- Logging retention$0.01 a month
- Vended network logs storage$0.25, paid once
In their own words
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.
Google Cloud Logging
Google Cloud Logging is a managed cloud service for storing, searching, analyzing and alerting on logs. Logs Explorer supports query-based searches, sorting, histogram views, field exploration and saved queries. Log Analytics uses BigQuery for SQL analysis, and log data can also be accessed in BigQuery alongside other business data. Google Cloud platform logs are ingested without setup; GKE workload logs are captured automatically, while the Ops Agent collects VM workload logs. Logs Router can send logs to external systems through Pub/Sub, and Cloud Storage can hold archives. Regional log buckets keep and process workload data in a selected region, with configurable access controls and retention. The service integrates with Cloud Monitoring, Error Reporting and Cloud Trace. Cloud Audit Logs records administrative activity and resource access, and its entries are immutable; the product page states 400 days of audit-log retention at no additional cost. Standard logging storage includes the first 50 GiB per project per month free, and new Google Cloud customers are offered $300 in credits. The listed deployment is cloud; platforms include API, Linux and web.