Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Splunk VS Fluentd

Compare Splunk VS Fluentd and see what are their differences

Splunk logo Splunk

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

Fluentd logo Fluentd

Fluentd is a cross platform open source data collection solution originally developed at Treasure Data.
  • Splunk Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-20
  • Fluentd Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-09-30

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.

Fluentd features and specs

  • Open Source
    Fluentd is an open-source data collector, meaning it is free to use and has a large community of contributors and users who can provide support and plugins.
  • Unified Logging Layer
    It provides a unified logging layer that can collect, filter, and distribute logs from various sources to various destinations, simplifying log management.
  • Extensibility
    Fluentd supports a wide range of plugins for inputs, outputs, filters, and parsers, making it highly extensible and customizable to fit specific needs.
  • High Performance
    It is designed to be high-performance and can handle large volumes of logs efficiently, which is crucial for enterprise environments.
  • Flexible Configuration
    Fluentd offers flexible and straightforward configuration, allowing users to define complex data pipelines with relative ease.
  • Support for Multiple Environments
    Fluentd supports cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments, making it versatile for various deployment scenarios.

Possible disadvantages of Fluentd

  • Complexity
    The flexibility and extensibility of Fluentd can introduce complexity, requiring a steep learning curve for new users to master the tool.
  • Resource Intensive
    Fluentd can be resource-intensive, especially when dealing with large volumes of data, which may require robust infrastructure.
  • Plugin Compatibility
    While there are many plugins available, not all of them are always up-to-date or compatible with the latest versions of Fluentd, potentially causing integration issues.
  • Maintenance Overhead
    Managing Fluentd involves continuous monitoring, updating, and maintenance to ensure optimal performance and security, which could be resource-draining.
  • Documentation Gaps
    Although there is extensive documentation, some users report that it lacks deep insights and examples for advanced configurations, requiring additional research and community support.

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

Fluentd videos

How-to Ship Logs to Grafana Loki with Promtail, FluentD & Fluent-bit

More videos:

  • Review - OpenShift Commons Briefing #72: Cloud Native Logging with Fluentd
  • Review - Fluentd, the Open Source Data Collection tool

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Splunk and Fluentd)
Monitoring Tools
68 68%
32% 32
Log Management
69 69%
31% 31
Performance Monitoring
79 79%
21% 21
Security & Privacy
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Splunk and Fluentd. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

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

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.

Fluentd Reviews

11 Best Splunk Alternatives
The CloudFront-log plugin, for example, can be used to ingest logs from Amazon CloudFront, while the elasticsearch plugin can be used to route logs to Elasticsearch. Fluentd only provides ingestion and routing services, so you'll have to develop your log management solution from the ground up. Fluentd has become a popular alternative to Logstash, transforming ELK into EFK....
Top 15 Kafka Alternatives Popular In 2021
Inputs and outputs have inbuilt support to buffer, load balance, timeout and retry instances. It has a unified logging layer in between the data sources. There are over 5000+ companies that rely on Fluentd and approximately collect logs from over 50000+ servers. It scraps logs from sources and sends them across to services like object storage, Elasticsearch, etc. it is...
Best Log Management Tools: Useful Tools for Log Management, Monitoring, Analytics, and More
Fluentd collects events from various data sources and writes them to files, RDBMS, NoSQL, IaaS, SaaS, Hadoop and so on. Fluentd helps you unify your logging infrastructure. Fluentd’s flagship feature is an extensive library of plugins which provide extended support and functionality for anything related to log and data management within a concise developer environment.
Source: stackify.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Splunk seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 19 times since March 2021. 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 / 3 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: over 2 years ago
View more

Fluentd mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Fluentd yet. Tracking of Fluentd recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Splunk and Fluentd, 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.

logstash - logstash is a tool for managing events and logs.

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.

Graylog - Graylog is an open source log management platform for collecting, indexing, and analyzing both structured and unstructured data.

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

rsyslog - Rsyslog is an enhanced syslogd supporting, among others, MySQL, PostgreSQL, failover log...