Log analytics · Elasticsearch B.V. (Elastic)

Elasticsearch

Distributed search and analytics engine underlying the ELK stack, used for log analytics, full-text search and, via Elastic Security, SIEM.

Visit Elasticsearch Alternatives

Elasticsearch is a distributed, JSON-document search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene, most commonly deployed as part of the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash/Beats for ingestion, Kibana for visualization) for log analytics, though it is equally used for general-purpose full-text and vector search. Elastic Security packages the same storage engine as a SIEM, which is why it appears in both log analytics and security-analytics shortlists. It can be self-managed under the Elastic License (source-available, not OSI open source since 2021) or consumed as Elastic Cloud, a managed hosted or serverless offering with usage-based billing. Serverless pricing bills for actual search/ingest/storage consumption; hosted pricing bills for provisioned resource capacity by subscription tier.

At a glance

Vendor Elasticsearch B.V. (Elastic)
Pricing model Usage-based
Free tier Yes
Deployment Cloud, Self-hosted
Open source No (Elastic License 2.0 / SSPL (source-available; AGPL-3.0 option since 2024))
Best for Teams needing a flexible, self-hostable search/log backend that can double as a SIEM without a separate platform.

Pricing

Elastic Cloud Hosted starts from a base monthly rate for a reference config plus usage-based instance pricing; self-managed is free with paid subscription tiers for advanced features.

Plan Price Notes
Standard from $99/month based on a 120GB storage / 2-zone reference configuration
Gold from $114/month same reference configuration; adds ML, cross-cluster replication
Platinum from $131/month same reference configuration; adds advanced security features
Enterprise from $184/month same reference configuration; full feature set

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

Features

  • Distributed inverted-index search at petabyte scale
  • Kibana for dashboards and log/trace exploration
  • Vector and hybrid search (dense + lexical)
  • Elastic Security app for SIEM on the same indices
  • Serverless or provisioned hosted deployment options
  • Rich ingest pipelines via Logstash and Beats/Elastic Agent

Integrations

Profile last reviewed September 21, 2026

Head to head

Alternatives

OpenSearch Open-source fork of Elasticsearch/Kibana for log analytics and search, now governed under the Linux Foundation. Splunk Long-established platform for indexing and searching machine data at scale, used for both IT log analytics and SIEM. Graylog Self-hostable log management platform with a free source-available core and paid Enterprise/Security tiers billed by daily volume. Sumo Logic Cloud-native SaaS log analytics platform with a credits-based consumption model covering logs, metrics and security.

Elasticsearch in the index now

Terms to know

Data observability Continuous automated monitoring of pipelines and datasets to catch freshness, volume and quality problems early. Data lake A storage repository that holds raw data of any format cheaply, with structure applied only when the data is read. Semantic search Search that matches results to a query's meaning rather than its exact keywords, using vector similarity between embeddings. SIEM (security information and event management) A platform that centralizes and correlates log and event data across an IT environment to detect and investigate security threats.

Related guides

How to choose a log analytics tool Pick a log platform by who owns it, whether you index everything or only labels, and how the pricing model behaves as volume grows.