Is etcd or Zabbix Cloud better?

Neither clearly leads. etcd starts at On request and Zabbix Cloud at $50/month, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.

Which is cheaper, etcd or Zabbix Cloud?

etcd starts at On request and Zabbix Cloud at $50/month.

Does etcd or Zabbix Cloud run on more platforms?

Both run on Web, so platform support will not decide this one for you.

What is etcd best used for?

etcd is most often used for storing kubernetes cluster state, which is what the overwhelming majority of etcd deployments are doing, leader election and distributed locking in a home-grown scheduler or control plane, using leases and transactions, service discovery and dynamic configuration where readers need to be notified of changes rather than poll for them, coordinating failover in a clustered database, as patroni does for postgresql. Of those, storing kubernetes cluster state, which is what the overwhelming majority of etcd deployments are doing and leader election and distributed locking in a home-grown scheduler or control plane, using leases and transactions are not what Zabbix Cloud is typically brought in for.

What can etcd do that Zabbix Cloud cannot?

etcd covers Raft consensus, Linearizable reads, Transactions, Leases.

Technology · head to head

etcd vs Zabbix Cloud

etcd

Technology

A distributed key-value store using Raft consensus, built for cluster coordination rather than application data.

From: On request
Rated: -

Full review Website

Zabbix Cloud

Technology

Zabbix monitoring, fully managed

From: $50/month
Rated: -

Full review Website

The short version

Each has a real cost: etcd it is sized for coordination data, not application data: the default backend quota is 2 GB and 8 GB is the documented recommended maximum, and exceeding it puts the cluster into a NOSPACE alarm where it accepts no writes until an operator compacts, defragments and clears the alarm by hand.; Zabbix Cloud billed by NVPS (new values per second) rather than by number of monitored hosts, so cost scales with metric volume: Nano starts at $50/month for 50 NVPS and 2xLarge reaches $5,000/month for 10,000 NVPS
Prices and features above were last checked on 30 August 2026.

Where they differ

Only the attributes on which etcd and Zabbix Cloud actually diverge.

Attributes where etcd and Zabbix Cloud differ
Attribute	etcd	Zabbix Cloud
Starting price	On request	$50/month
Pricing model	open-source	subscription

Identical on both: free tier (No), platforms (Web), user rating (Not yet rated), category (Technology).

What each one covers

Drawn from each product's published feature list. An absence here means we hold no record of it - not that the product lacks it.

Only in etcd

Raft consensus
Linearizable reads
Transactions
Leases
Watches
MVCC revision history
Role-based access control
Snapshot backup and restore

Only in Zabbix Cloud

Nothing recorded that etcd does not also cover.

What people use each for

The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.

etcd

Storing Kubernetes cluster state, which is what the overwhelming majority of etcd deployments are doingnot Zabbix Cloud
Leader election and distributed locking in a home-grown scheduler or control plane, using leases and transactionsnot Zabbix Cloud
Service discovery and dynamic configuration where readers need to be notified of changes rather than poll for themnot Zabbix Cloud
Coordinating failover in a clustered database, as Patroni does for PostgreSQLnot Zabbix Cloud

Zabbix Cloud

Network performance monitoring and detectionnot etcd
Server health and performance trackingnot etcd
Container monitoring in Kubernetes environmentsnot etcd
Database performance across vendor platformsnot etcd
VMware and Windows infrastructure observationnot etcd

Where each one falls short

Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.

etcd

It is sized for coordination data, not application data: the default backend quota is 2 GB and 8 GB is the documented recommended maximum, and exceeding it puts the cluster into a NOSPACE alarm where it accepts no writes until an operator compacts, defragments and clears the alarm by hand.
Every write is replicated and fsynced before acknowledgement, so cluster performance is bounded by the slowest disk in it; a member on network-attached storage with high fsync latency causes leader elections and cluster-wide latency spikes that look like network problems and are not.
Adding members increases availability but reduces write throughput, because each write must reach a larger quorum; you run three or five members for fault tolerance, and increasing capacity means faster hardware rather than more nodes.
There is no sharding and no multi-tenancy, so isolating workloads means running separate clusters, each with its own quorum, certificates, backup schedule and upgrade path, and that operational multiplication is often unexpected.
Running it yourself is a real job: periodic compaction and defragmentation, snapshot backups you have actually rehearsed restoring, and rotation of both peer and client TLS certificates, none of which happens automatically outside a managed Kubernetes service.
Losing quorum is not self-healing; recovering a cluster that has lost a majority means restoring from a snapshot and accepting that everything written since that snapshot is gone, which makes backup frequency a data-loss budget decision rather than a routine setting.

Zabbix Cloud

Billed by NVPS (new values per second) rather than by number of monitored hosts, so cost scales with metric volume: Nano starts at $50/month for 50 NVPS and 2xLarge reaches $5,000/month for 10,000 NVPS
The free trial lasts only 5 days before a paid subscription is required
Annual subscription is needed to get the 10% discount; the base prices listed are monthly rates

Pricing, plan by plan

etcd

On request

No published plan breakdown. See the etcd review.

Zabbix Cloud

$50/month

Nano$50/month
- 50 NVPS
- 10GB storage free
Micro$100/month
- 100 NVPS
Small$250/month
- 250 NVPS
Medium$750/month
- 1000 NVPS

Which should you pick?

Choose etcd if

You need raft consensus.
You also want linearizable reads.

etcd review

Choose Zabbix Cloud if

Nothing in the data separates Zabbix Cloud from etcd on the points above - pick on price and on how each one feels to use.

Zabbix Cloud review

Questions people ask

Is etcd or Zabbix Cloud better?: Neither clearly leads. etcd starts at On request and Zabbix Cloud at $50/month, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
Which is cheaper, etcd or Zabbix Cloud?: etcd starts at On request and Zabbix Cloud at $50/month.
Does etcd or Zabbix Cloud run on more platforms?: Both run on Web, so platform support will not decide this one for you.
What is etcd best used for?: etcd is most often used for storing kubernetes cluster state, which is what the overwhelming majority of etcd deployments are doing, leader election and distributed locking in a home-grown scheduler or control plane, using leases and transactions, service discovery and dynamic configuration where readers need to be notified of changes rather than poll for them, coordinating failover in a clustered database, as patroni does for postgresql. Of those, storing kubernetes cluster state, which is what the overwhelming majority of etcd deployments are doing and leader election and distributed locking in a home-grown scheduler or control plane, using leases and transactions are not what Zabbix Cloud is typically brought in for.
What can etcd do that Zabbix Cloud cannot?: etcd covers Raft consensus, Linearizable reads, Transactions, Leases.

Answered from the vendors’ own pages

etcd: Can I use etcd as an application database?

No. It is designed for metadata and coordination, with a recommended maximum store size of around 8 GB, no sharding and a write path deliberately optimised for durability rather than throughput. Application data belongs in a database built for it.

Zabbix Cloud: What is the starting price for Zabbix Cloud?

Zabbix Cloud starts at $50 per month for the Nano tier, which includes 50 NVPS and 10GB of free storage. Pricing scales up to $5000 monthly for the 2xLarge tier with 10000 NVPS.

Source

etcd: How many members should a cluster have?

Three for most cases, five where you need to survive two simultaneous failures. Always an odd number, because an even-sized cluster gains no additional fault tolerance while making quorum harder to reach.

Zabbix Cloud: Is there a free trial for Zabbix Cloud?

Yes, Zabbix Cloud offers a 5-day free trial with no credit card required. After the trial, you save 10% by converting to an annual subscription.

Source

etcd: What happens when the store fills up?

The cluster raises a NOSPACE alarm and stops accepting writes, becoming effectively read-only. Recovery requires compacting old revisions, defragmenting each member and then explicitly disarming the alarm, all done by an operator.

Zabbix Cloud: How does annual billing work with Zabbix Cloud?

Annual subscribers receive a 10% discount on monthly pricing. A pricing calculator is available to estimate costs based on devices, metrics, update intervals, and storage requirements.

Source

etcd: Why is my etcd cluster slow or unstable?

Almost always disk latency. Because every write is fsynced before acknowledgement, slow or shared storage causes heartbeat timeouts, leader elections and cascading latency. Local SSDs with low fsync latency are effectively a requirement.

etcd: How does it compare with Consul or ZooKeeper?

All three provide consensus-backed coordination. etcd has the simplest data model and the Kubernetes ecosystem behind it; Consul bundles service discovery, health checking and a service mesh; ZooKeeper is older, JVM-based and still common under Kafka and Hadoop-era systems.

etcd vs Zabbix Cloud

etcd

Zabbix Cloud

The short version

Where they differ

What each one covers

Only in etcd

Only in Zabbix Cloud

What people use each for

etcd

Zabbix Cloud

Where each one falls short

etcd

Zabbix Cloud

Pricing, plan by plan

etcd

Zabbix Cloud

Which should you pick?

Choose etcd if

Choose Zabbix Cloud if

Questions people ask

Answered from the vendors’ own pages

Related pages

More on etcd

More on Zabbix Cloud

Keep looking

Other head to heads