I don't know much about Zookeeper, having not used it personally, but I do manage a large Consul installation as part of my Ops role for for a large cloud-based SaaS provider. Not knowing anything about differences in functionality, one thing that stands out to me is platform differences. If you're in a Java shop and have all the tools and expertise for managing Java applications, then Zookeeper will fit right in. If you _aren't_ a Java shop, then that's an additional layer of complexity you will be forced to manage. So for the most part, we aren't a Java shop at my job, so Consul's native binary is very appealing because it's simple and straightforward.

Consider that the Consul binary distribution is a zip file containing a single file. Compare that to Zookeeper's tarball which contains 1538 files. That maybe isn't a fair point on which to make a comparison, but I think it's an important signal about their respective approaches. Various people might have different reactions to those numbers, so I'm not trying to pass judgment here. Just giving an idea of one way to think about differences.