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Splunk VS Fluent Bit

Compare Splunk VS Fluent Bit and see what are their differences

Splunk logo Splunk

Splunk's operational intelligence platform helps unearth intelligent insights from machine data.

Fluent Bit logo Fluent Bit

Data collector and log forwarder
  • Splunk Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-20
  • Fluent Bit Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-29

Splunk features and specs

  • Powerful Data Analysis
    Splunk provides robust data indexing and search capabilities, allowing users to analyze large volumes of log data with high flexibility and efficiency.
  • Real-Time Processing
    Splunk enables real-time monitoring and analysis of data, which helps in immediate detection of anomalies and operational issues.
  • Scalability
    Splunk can efficiently scale to handle large amounts of data from various sources, making it suitable for both small businesses and large enterprises.
  • Wide Range of Integrations
    Splunk offers extensive integration options with numerous third-party applications and services, enhancing its functionalities and utility.
  • User-Friendly Interface
    Splunk comes with a highly intuitive and user-friendly interface, which makes it easier for users to navigate and leverage its features without extensive training.
  • Advanced Security Features
    Splunk includes comprehensive security features such as access controls, data encryption, and auditing capabilities to ensure data protection and compliance.

Possible disadvantages of Splunk

  • High Cost
    Splunk is considered expensive compared to other data analytics tools, which can be a significant constraint for smaller organizations or those with limited budgets.
  • Complex Licensing
    The licensing model for Splunk can be complex and confusing, often leading to issues in predicting costs and understanding the full extent of required licensing.
  • Steep Learning Curve
    Despite its user-friendly interface, there is a steep learning curve associated with mastering Splunk’s advanced features and query language, which can be challenging for new users.
  • Resource Intensive
    Splunk can be resource-intensive, requiring substantial computational power and storage, which might necessitate additional hardware investments.
  • Custom App Development
    Building custom apps and dashboards in Splunk may require specialized knowledge of its proprietary language, which can limit customization for users without technical expertise.

Fluent Bit features and specs

  • Lightweight
    Fluent Bit is a lightweight and efficient log processor and forwarder, which makes it suitable for environments with limited resources.
  • High Performance
    It is designed to handle high volumes of log data with minimal resource consumption, providing fast data processing and delivery.
  • Versatile
    Fluent Bit supports a wide range of input and output plugins, enabling integration with various data sources and destinations.
  • Configuration Simplicity
    Fluent Bit offers a simple and flexible configuration file, making it easy to set up and manage logging pipelines.
  • Cloud Native
    It is designed to work seamlessly in cloud-native environments and is compatible with container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.

Possible disadvantages of Fluent Bit

  • Community Support
    While Fluent Bit has active development, community support and resources may not be as extensive as more established logging solutions.
  • Complex Use Cases
    Fluent Bit may not be able to handle complex data processing or transformations out of the box, necessitating additional tools or custom development.
  • Limited GUI
    It lacks a native graphical user interface, which might pose challenges for users who prefer visual configuration and monitoring tools.
  • Learning Curve
    Though it is simpler compared to some alternatives, there can be a learning curve associated with understanding Fluent Bit’s configuration and plugin system.

Splunk videos

"Splunk Product Overview"

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Splunk in 60 Minutes | Splunk Tutorial For Beginners | Splunk Training | Splunk Tutorial | Edureka
  • Demo - Splunk Incident Review Demo

Fluent Bit videos

Webinar: Fluent Bit v1.5

More videos:

  • Review - Fluent Bit: Extending Your Logging Pipeline with Go - Warren Fernandes & Jason Keene, Pivotal

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Splunk and Fluent Bit)
Monitoring Tools
90 90%
10% 10
Log Management
91 91%
9% 9
Performance Monitoring
79 79%
21% 21
Machine Data Analytics
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Splunk and Fluent Bit

Splunk Reviews

The 10 Best Nagios Alternatives in 2024 (Paid and Open-source)
What sets Splunk apart, likely contributing to its premium price, is its expansive network. With over 2,200 partners spanning various industries, Splunk ensures users can fully leverage the platform. Additionally, boasting a community of over 18,000 active members and 1,800 Splunk experts, users have access to support for problem-solving, architecture, deployment, and...
Source: betterstack.com
Top 10 Grafana Alternatives in 2024
Splunk’s security and data monitoring features make it a potent alternative to Grafana. The platform helps collect and store extensive data from multiple platforms like databases, messaging systems, and network devices.
Source: middleware.io
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
Splunk's strengths lie in its adeptness at handling large-scale data ingestion and robust analytics capabilities. This makes it invaluable for organizations with complex data monitoring needs, particularly in enterprise security and observability.
Source: signoz.io
10 Best Grafana Alternatives [2023 Comparison]
Splunk is a well-known log management solution that’s been around forever. It offers a variety of observability solutions, making it an ideal Grafana alternative in terms of functionality. Splunk offers users Log Management, Synthetic monitoring, Infrastructure Monitoring, APM, Security Monitoring, and more.
Source: sematext.com
Top 11 Best SIEM Tools in 2022 For Real-Time Incident Response and Security
Splunk provides improved security operations like customizable dashboards, asset investigator, statistical analysis, and incident review, classification, and investigation. It has features of alerts management, risk scores, etc. It provides security services to the public sectors, financial services, and healthcare.

Fluent Bit Reviews

We have no reviews of Fluent Bit yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Splunk might be a bit more popular than Fluent Bit. We know about 19 links to it since March 2021 and only 16 links to Fluent Bit. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Splunk mentions (19)

  • Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2025)
    Splunk (A Cisco Company) [https://splunk.com] | Principal Software Engineer, Backend | Remote (Vancouver / Toronto, Canada) Splunk is here to build a safer and more resilient digital world. The world's leading enterprises use our unified security and observability platform to keep their digital systems secure and reliable. The role I'm hiring for is to lead the effort for a new API that will power Splunk's new... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
  • Can I install apps on Free 60 day Enterprise?
    I'm using the free 60day Enterprise license and tried to install different apps from the "Browse more apps" menu in Splunk Enterprise, but it doesn't accept my credentials when I try to log in. I tried my username and password from splunk.com(which I'm sure it works, because I tried it straight away on the official website). Also I tried using my username and password with which I'm accessing Splunk Enterprise,... Source: over 1 year ago
  • Can someone explain this before I go a little crazy? xD
    I'm noticing a questionable trend in Splunk question/answer structure for these free courses on splunk.com So I go to an exam dump to try and compare to something I have studied thus far. (Prepping for entry level 1002). Source: over 1 year ago
  • Where exactly can I start to learn?
    With your splunk.com username, you can login to Splunk trainings portals as well https://www.splunk.com/en_us/training.html .. There are lots of free trainings available. Enroll yourself, complete them, you will gain more confidence. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • VAST 3.0 released. Open-Source Security Data Pipelines with Kusto-like syntax
    VAST is an open-source SecDataOps project for working with data from open-source security tools. Version 3.0 adds a pipeline syntax similar to splunk, Kusto, PRQL, and Zed. Source: about 2 years ago
View more

Fluent Bit mentions (16)

  • Vectorized Data Pipelines
    I kept an eye on both Fluent Bit and Vector for a while. I decided to pick one to test in production, in particular to:. - Source: dev.to / 20 days ago
  • Building Web Applications Using Amazon EKS : AWS Project
    In this lab, you will use *Fluent Bit *to route logs. The lab order will install CloudWatch Agent **to collect metric of the cluster and **Fluent Bit to send logs to CloudWatch Logs in DaemonSet type. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • Data on Kubernetes: Part 4 - Argo Workflows: Simplify parallel jobs : Container-native workflow engine for Kubernetes 🔮
    In this section, we'll dive into creating and deploying a data processing platform on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service Amazon EKS.   The solution includes essential Kubernetes add-ons: Argo Workflows, Argo Events, Spark Operator for managing Spark jobs, Fluent Bit for logging, and Prometheus for metrics. - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
  • Using Cloud Monitoring to Monitor IRIS-Based Applications Deployed in GKE
    We’ve shown one of the almost endless approaches to monitoring IRIS applications deployed in GKE. This time we’ve focused on metrics stored in Cloud Monitoring and displayed in Grafana. But don’t forget about IRIS logs. Pods logs are, at the moment of writing, gathered by fluentbit and sent to Cloud Logging where they can be viewed. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Fluent Bit with ECS: Configuration Tips and Tricks
    $ docker run --rm fluent-bit-dummy WARNING: The requested image's platform (linux/amd64) does not match the detected host platform (linux/arm64/v8) and no specific platform was requested Fluent Bit v1.9.10 * Copyright (C) 2015-2022 The Fluent Bit Authors * Fluent Bit is a CNCF sub-project under the umbrella of Fluentd * https://fluentbit.io [2023/12/24 16:06:59] [ info] [fluent bit] version=1.9.10,... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Splunk and Fluent Bit, you can also consider the following products

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

Prometheus - An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

NewRelic - New Relic is a Software Analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics across millions of apps. We help the people who build modern software understand the stories their data is trying to tell them.

Telegraf - Telegraf is the Agent for Collecting & Reporting Metrics & Data.

Grafana - Data visualization & Monitoring with support for Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and many more databases

collectd - System and applications metrics collector