After reading through the Logstash and Beats introduction, you might be confused as to whether Beats is a replacement for Logstash, the difference between them, or when to use one over the other. Beats are lightweight agents and consume fewer resources, and hence are installed on the edge servers where the operational data needs to be collected and shipped. Beats lack the powerful features of Logstash for parsing and transforming events. Logstash has many options in terms of inputs, filters, and output plugins for collecting, enriching, and transforming data. However, it is very resource-intensive and can also be used as an independent product outside of the Elastic Stack. Logstash is recommended to be installed on a dedicated server rather than edge servers, and listens for incoming events for processing. Beats and Logstash are complementary products, and depending on the use case, both of them can be used or just one of them can be used, as described in the Introducing Beats section.