The issues discussed by aphyr have been fully fixed as of Consul 0.2, several months ago. In the initial release of Consul, only the "default" mode was availabl

The issues discussed by aphyr have been fully fixed as of Consul 0.2, several months ago. In the initial release of Consul, only the "default" mode was available and has the now-documented caveat of a stale read possibility. The various consistency modes are now discussed here: https://www.consul.io/docs/internals/consensus.html#default https://www.consul.io/docs/internals/consensus.html#default With respect to ZooKeeper, there are different approaches. ZK provides a low-level primitive on which you can build. Consul provides similar primitives, but it ships with many features out of the box that don't require any development effort. It's a "batteries included" approach. Specific examples: - Real-time configuration with Consul + consul-template - DNS based service discovery - Scalable Nagios replacement - Dynamic HAProxy / Varnish configuration - Application configuration with Consul + envconsul - Triggering config management tools with the event system That is just a handful of uses for Consul that don't require writing any code. Doing similar things with ZK is possible, just requires a lot more work.