Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Consul

1.1K
1.5K
+ 1
210
linkerd

128
299
+ 1
7
Add tool

Consul vs linkerd: What are the differences?

Developers describe Consul as "A tool for service discovery, monitoring and configuration". Consul is a tool for service discovery and configuration. Consul is distributed, highly available, and extremely scalable. On the other hand, linkerd is detailed as "Twitter-Style Operability for Microservices". linkerd is an out-of-process network stack for microservices. It functions as a transparent RPC proxy, handling everything needed to make inter-service RPC safe and sane--including load-balancing, service discovery, instrumentation, and routing.

Consul belongs to "Open Source Service Discovery" category of the tech stack, while linkerd can be primarily classified under "Microservices Tools".

Some of the features offered by Consul are:

  • Service Discovery - Consul makes it simple for services to register themselves and to discover other services via a DNS or HTTP interface. External services such as SaaS providers can be registered as well.
  • Health Checking - Health Checking enables Consul to quickly alert operators about any issues in a cluster. The integration with service discovery prevents routing traffic to unhealthy hosts and enables service level circuit breakers.
  • Key/Value Storage - A flexible key/value store enables storing dynamic configuration, feature flagging, coordination, leader election and more. The simple HTTP API makes it easy to use anywhere.

On the other hand, linkerd provides the following key features:

  • Adaptive load-balancing
  • Fine-grained instrumentation
  • Abstractions over service discovery

Consul and linkerd are both open source tools. It seems that Consul with 16.2K GitHub stars and 2.82K forks on GitHub has more adoption than linkerd with 5K GitHub stars and 499 GitHub forks.

Get Advice from developers at your company using StackShare Enterprise. Sign up for StackShare Enterprise.
Learn More
Pros of Consul
Pros of linkerd
  • 60
    Great service discovery infrastructure
  • 35
    Health checking
  • 29
    Distributed key-value store
  • 26
    Monitoring
  • 23
    High-availability
  • 12
    Web-UI
  • 10
    Token-based acls
  • 6
    Gossip clustering
  • 5
    Dns server
  • 3
    Not Java
  • 1
    Docker integration
  • 3
    CNCF Project
  • 1
    Service Mesh
  • 1
    Fast Integration
  • 1
    Pre-check permissions
  • 1
    Light Weight

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

- No public GitHub repository available -

What is Consul?

Consul is a tool for service discovery and configuration. Consul is distributed, highly available, and extremely scalable.

What is linkerd?

linkerd is an out-of-process network stack for microservices. It functions as a transparent RPC proxy, handling everything needed to make inter-service RPC safe and sane--including load-balancing, service discovery, instrumentation, and routing.

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

What companies use Consul?
What companies use linkerd?
See which teams inside your own company are using Consul or linkerd.
Sign up for StackShare EnterpriseLearn More

Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

What tools integrate with Consul?
What tools integrate with linkerd?

Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

Blog Posts

What are some alternatives to Consul and linkerd?
etcd
etcd is a distributed key value store that provides a reliable way to store data across a cluster of machines. It’s open-source and available on GitHub. etcd gracefully handles master elections during network partitions and will tolerate machine failure, including the master.
Zookeeper
A centralized service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services. All of these kinds of services are used in some form or another by distributed applications.
SkyDNS
SkyDNS is a distributed service for announcement and discovery of services. It leverages Raft for high-availability and consensus, and utilizes DNS queries to discover available services. This is done by leveraging SRV records in DNS, with special meaning given to subdomains, priorities and weights (more info here: http://blog.gopheracademy.com/skydns).
Ambassador
Map services to arbitrary URLs in a single, declarative YAML file. Configure routes with CORS support, circuit breakers, timeouts, and more. Replace your Kubernetes ingress controller. Route gRPC, WebSockets, or HTTP.
Kubernetes
Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.
See all alternatives