Tool Introduction

Elastic N.V. was founded in 2012 by Shay Banon, Steven Schuurman, Uri Boness, and Simon Willnauer, several years after Banon began building the Elasticsearch engine in 2009 out of an earlier 2004 recipe-search side project. The Dutch-American public company is headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, with major operations in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Known informally as Elasticsearch in its early years, the company rebranded to Elastic around its 2015 acquisition of hosted-Elasticsearch provider Found. Shares began trading on the NYSE under the ticker ESTC on October 5, 2018.

Demo Available?

A free 14-day Elastic Cloud trial starts on cluster creation with 8GB RAM and 240GB storage, with no commitment stated. A contact-sales path covers custom quotes.

Tool's Accuracy

For a search and analytics engine, a correct result means returning the most relevant documents for a query and ranking them accurately at scale. Elastic's machine learning documentation reports a retrieval-quality measurement for ELSER V2, the model that performs semantic sparse retrieval, evaluated against a BM25 lexical-search baseline across the BEIR benchmark suite using the NDCG@10 metric.

Retrieval quality: 10 wins, 1 draw, 1 loss versus BM25, and an average improvement in NDCG@10 of 18%.
Ingestion throughput: up to 26 docs/s for the hardware-optimized V2 model against 14 docs/s for V1, a stated improvement of about 90%, which measures performance rather than accuracy.

ELSER V2 is the generally available version, with V1 marked as technical preview, so the benchmark applies to the shipping model.

Aggregate Rating

4.3/5 stars (based on 170+ verified reviews across the internet)

Detailed Overview

What Elastic Does

Teams get answers out of large, mixed data sets in one place: application logs, business documents, security events, and vectors, the numeric representations that let a search engine match meaning rather than exact words. Elasticsearch, a distributed engine built on Apache Lucene, handles indexing and ranking. Kibana covers exploration and dashboards, while Beats and Logstash move the data in.

Who Elastic Is For

Developers and platform engineers building custom search experiences, site reliability teams watching production for incidents, and SOC (security operations center) analysts chasing threats all work against the same stored data. Scale rather than headcount drives adoption: a three-person security team at Vrije Universiteit Brussel manages 64 billion events, and Siemens correlates 6 billion events a day across 300,000 endpoints.

Top Differentiators

One shared Elasticsearch data layer serves search, observability, and security teams instead of three siloed products, so telemetry gets stored once. Security pricing follows compute and storage rather than a charge per protected endpoint. More than 1,300 detection rules are published openly on GitHub, and the AI approach stays model-agnostic across Elastic Managed LLMs, OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or on-premises open source models.

Founding Year

2012

Target Industry

B2B, Enterprise, SMB, Public Sector, Financial Services, Telecommunications, Retail and Ecommerce, Manufacturing and Automotive, Healthcare, Technology, Media and Entertainment

Available Integrations

AWS: pulls logs and metrics from EC2, RDS, Lambda, S3, CloudTrail, WAF and more; adds extra AWS charges on CloudWatch API requests.
CrowdStrike: ingests Falcon alerts, host inventory, and vulnerability data for SIEM correlation; Beta at version 4.9.1, JSON output only, Basic subscription required.
Kubernetes: collects kubelet, kube-state-metrics, API server, and scheduler metrics plus container and audit logs; kube-state-metrics must be deployed separately.
Kafka: monitors brokers, consumer groups, partitions, JVM, and KRaft consensus metrics; requires attaching a Jolokia agent through KAFKA_OPTS.
Salesforce: indexes Accounts, Cases, Leads, and Opportunities with SOQL sync rules; document-level security applies per object type and caps 500 nested entities.
SharePoint Online: syncs sites, lists, and document libraries; Teams-connected sites are excluded, folders over 5,000 files fail, GA for self-managed only.
Slack: indexes public-channel messages and users via a Bot User OAuth Token; Technical Preview, no attachment processing, no permission syncing.
GitHub: indexes repositories, pull requests, issues, and markdown files on Cloud and Enterprise; document-level security covers organization-owned repositories only.
ServiceNow: indexes Incident, Knowledge, and Change Request records with role-mapped document-level security enforced at table level, not per record.
Elastic Agent catalog: over 300 turn-key packages inside Kibana and Fleet, alongside Search connectors, an Open Crawler, Logstash pipelines, and ingest APIs.

Elastic Cloud Hosted

Resource-based pricing billed per GB of RAM per hour, paid monthly or prepaid, varying by cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP), region, node type, and number of availability zones. Every deployment includes a free allowance of a 1GB Kibana instance, a 1GB machine-learning node, a 2GB Search instance, and a 1GB APM server. Purchasing is also available through AWS Marketplace (monthly or annual), Azure Marketplace (monthly, annual via contact), and Google Cloud Marketplace (Standard, Gold, Platinum tiers).

Elastic Cloud Serverless

Ingest: as low as $0.14 per VCU per hour
Search: as low as $0.09 per VCU per hour
Machine Learning: as low as $0.07 per VCU per hour
Storage and retention: as low as $0.047 per GB retained per month
Egress: as low as $0.05 per GB transferred per month
Elastic Managed LLM: $4.50 per million input tokens and $21 per million output tokens
Elastic Inference Service: as low as $0.08 per million tokens
Workflows: 10,000 free executions per month, then as low as $0.0108 per execution
Agent Builder: 1,000 free executions per month, then as low as $0.025 per execution
Vector profiles: 50GB free storage

Worked examples on the serverless pricing page cite roughly $24-$27 per month for a dev environment and roughly $190-$210 per month for a production environment.

Self-managed subscriptions

Licensed by number of nodes and RAM used. Free and Open (Basic) carries no listed price and includes storage types, data management, stack management, scalability and resiliency, Elastic Stack security, alerting, clients, and a localized UI. Gold is discontinued for new customers and covered business-hours support with 6 contacts and target response times of Critical 4 hours, L2 1 day, L3 2 days. Platinum is contact sales and closed to new customers, with 24/7/365 support, 8 contacts, and target response times of Critical 1 hour, L2 4 hours, L3 1 business day. Enterprise is contact sales with the same response targets, 24/7/365 support, 8 contacts, and comprehensive feature access including synthetic _source and advanced cluster rebalancing. All self-managed tiers include unlimited incidents and projects, web and phone support, and emergency patches.

Support and terms

Hosted and Serverless reference four support tiers (Standard, Gold, Platinum, Enterprise), with a 99.95% Monthly Uptime SLA stated for Platinum and Enterprise subscription tiers; premium support can run up to 15% of consumption charges. Monthly subscribers can upgrade immediately, while downgrades apply at the next billing cycle.

Pricing last verified: 09/09/2026
Disclaimer: Pricing is subject to change. Please confirm current pricing on the vendor site.

Features & Specs

Search engine: distributed, RESTful engine on Apache Lucene handling structured, unstructured, time-series, geospatial, log/event, and vector data without reformatting.
Hybrid retrieval: dense and sparse vector search combined with keyword BM25 matching, the ELSER (Elastic Learned Sparse EncodeR) model, and text plus image vectors in one API.
Inference API: plugs in third-party models from OpenAI, Cohere, and others for RAG workflows, with documented framework integrations such as LlamaIndex.
Deployment: Serverless on AWS, GCP, and Azure; Cloud Hosted adding Alibaba Cloud and FedRAMP regions; self-managed via Docker or Kubernetes.
Clients: official libraries for Java, Python, Go, Ruby, Rust, .NET, and PHP, plus raw REST access and 350+ integrations.
Observability: unified logs, metrics, and APM (application performance monitoring) with ML anomaly detection and a frozen long-retention data tier.
Security: SIEM/XDR with AI Assistant triage, Jina AI multimodal retrieval, and over 1,300 open detection rules on GitHub.
Subscription tiers: Free and open Basic, Gold (discontinued), Platinum (SAML/LDAP, encryption at rest, 1-hour critical response), Enterprise (synthetic _source from 8.17 onward, 8 named contacts).
Resilience: 99.95% Monthly Uptime SLA on Platinum and Enterprise cloud tiers, with autoscaling, rebalancing, replication, and cross-cluster federated search.

Security & Compliance

Elastic publishes third-party certifications and attestations covering FedRAMP High and Moderate authorizations, HIPAA, IRAP Assessed at Protected B, Cyber Essentials Plus, ISO/IEC 27001, 27017, and 27018, SOC 2 and SOC 3 reports, CSA STAR, PCI DSS as a Level 1 Service Provider, and TISAX.

Data protection: encryption for data at rest and in transit.
Identity: SSO (single sign-on) and SCIM for user provisioning, with compliance audit trails.
Residency: multi-region deployment options to meet data-residency requirements.
Privacy: a formal privacy program addressing GDPR, a published privacy statement, and a dedicated channel for privacy requests.
Assurance: a Cloud Service Security Overview describing the information security management system, with security audit reports available through an assurance portal.
Reporting: a published security contact, security@elastic.co, for compromised accounts and security concerns.

Industry Use-Cases

Manufacturing security operations at endpoint scale

Siemens correlates 6 billion events a day across 300,000 endpoints, a volume that buries analysts in manual triage. Elastic Security carries that correlation, and per the company's published case studies, the shift reclaims roughly 5,000 SOC analyst hours a year.

Utility metering networks

Protecting 124 million devices leaves no room for slow detection. SmartDCC moved its monitoring onto Elastic Security and cut incident detection time by 84%.

Higher education with a small security team

Three people cannot read 64 billion events by hand. Vrije Universiteit Brussel rebuilt its security operations around Elastic Security, and a team of 3 now manages that full event volume.

Payments alert triage

Reviewing a single alert at Visa took 10 to 20 minutes. Workflow and security automation on Elastic compressed the same triage to seconds.

Banking delivery pipelines

More than 70,000 repositories left blind spots across Banco Bradesco's software delivery. Elastic Observability closed them, giving the bank 100% pipeline visibility.

Broadcast infrastructure retention

Retention limits push broadcasters to discard operational history early. RTL Germany tripled its data retention using the frozen data tier in Elastic Observability, with zero downtime.

Airline operations monitoring

Alert noise crowds out genuine faults in airline systems. Cathay Pacific applied Elastic Observability and reduced operational noise by roughly 30%.

National-scale retail banking availability

A leading Indian bank serving 50 million customers has to catch degradation before customers notice it. Machine-learning anomaly detection inside Elastic Observability underpins the platform, which has held 100% platform availability.

Tool's Alternatives

Splunk pairs Splunk Enterprise Security, a SIEM with SOAR automation and UEBA, with an Observability Cloud and a core platform for log search, sold as Splunk Cloud Platform or self-managed Splunk Enterprise. Its strength is mature security content and a stated 2,400+ app ecosystem with a claimed 80% reduction in alert volume from automation. The limitation is licensing tied to data-ingest volume, a widely reported cost driver at scale. The differentiator is SOAR and UEBA built into the core platform as first-party response automation.

Datadog runs one integrated SaaS platform spanning infrastructure and APM observability, Cloud SIEM, digital experience monitoring, software delivery tooling, and AI observability. Its strength is a single dashboard and data model across infrastructure, application, and security telemetry with nothing to self-host. The limitation follows from that: organizations needing on-premises or air-gapped deployment cannot run it internally. Its differentiator is DevOps workflow tooling such as CI visibility, feature flags, DORA metrics, and an App Builder inside the observability product.

OpenSearch is an open-source search and observability platform governed by the OpenSearch Software Foundation under the Linux Foundation, established September 2024, covering search, observability, security analytics, and vector search. Its strength is API-level familiarity as a direct fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana. The limitation is the absence of a single commercial vendor offering managed SLAs and enterprise support of comparable breadth, since support arrives through foundation ecosystem vendors such as AWS. Apache 2.0 licensing plus foundation governance is the differentiator.

Grafana Labs combines Grafana dashboards with Loki for logs, Tempo for tracing, and Mimir for metrics, offered self-hosted or as managed Grafana Cloud. Its strength is an OpenTelemetry-native, no-lock-in stance built on open standards and an open plugin ecosystem. The limitation is scope: visualization and metrics, logs, and traces correlation, without full-text search or a built-in security-analytics product on the level of Elastic Security. Adaptive Telemetry, which filters unused signals before storage, is its stated differentiator.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Elastic and what does the platform do?

Elastic builds Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack, a distributed search and analytics engine paired with Kibana, Beats, and Logstash, sold as three solutions: Elastic Search, Elastic Observability, and Elastic Security.

What deployment options does Elastic offer for teams?

Three paths exist: Elastic Cloud Serverless on AWS, GCP, and Azure; Elastic Cloud Hosted, which adds Alibaba Cloud and FedRAMP regions; and self-managed installs on-premises or in private cloud through Docker or Kubernetes.

How much does Elastic Cloud Serverless cost to run?

Serverless bills usage: ingest as low as $0.14 per VCU per hour, search $0.09, machine learning $0.07, and storage $0.047 per GB retained monthly. Worked examples cite roughly $24-$27 monthly for a dev environment.

Is there a free trial of Elastic Cloud?

Yes. A 14-day free trial begins the moment a cluster is created, provisioning 8GB of RAM and 240GB of storage, with no commitment stated on the pricing page.

Which self-managed subscription tiers are still sold?

Free and Open (Basic) stays available to everyone. Gold and Platinum are closed to new customers, and Enterprise is sold through contact sales with 24/7/365 support and 8 named support contacts.

What certifications does Elastic hold for regulated buyers?

FedRAMP High and Moderate, HIPAA, IRAP Assessed at Protected B, Cyber Essentials Plus, ISO/IEC 27001, 27017, and 27018, SOC 2 and SOC 3, CSA STAR, PCI DSS Level 1, and TISAX.

How accurate is Elastic semantic search versus keyword search?

Elastic documents ELSER V2 against a BM25 baseline across the BEIR benchmark using the NDCG@10 metric, reporting 10 wins, 1 draw, 1 loss, and an average NDCG@10 improvement of 18%.

What uptime and support commitments back paid tiers?

Platinum and Enterprise cloud subscriptions carry a 99.95% Monthly Uptime SLA. Platinum targets a 1-hour critical response time, and premium support can reach 15% of consumption charges.

How many integrations and language clients are available?

Elastic states 350+ integrations spanning AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Kubernetes, Apache, and OpenTelemetry, with official clients for Java, Python, Go, Ruby, Rust, .NET, and PHP plus REST access.

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