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Amazon CloudWatch vs Elastic Stack comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon CloudWatch
Ranking in Log Management
19th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
49
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (24th), Cloud Monitoring Software (15th)
Elastic Stack
Ranking in Log Management
23rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Amazon CloudWatch is 1.3%, down from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Stack is 1.6%, down from 4.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon CloudWatch1.3%
Elastic Stack1.6%
Other97.1%
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Amandeep Pawar - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer Technology at Iris Software Technologies Private Limited
Monitoring microservices has improved and teams respond faster to production incidents
In my opinion, the best features Amazon CloudWatch offers are Metrics, Analytics, Logs, Alarms, Dashboards, and Log Insights, with standout features being real-time monitoring and centralized logging, proactive alerting, and fast troubleshooting. The dashboards in Amazon CloudWatch help with troubleshooting by allowing us to easily look into API latency and how much resource consumption is occurring. The CloudWatch dashboard provides real-time data and views of our application health while Log Insights lets us quickly search and analyze logs to identify root causes of production issues, making troubleshooting time efficient and monitoring much more streamlined. Amazon CloudWatch has positively impacted my organization by improving our ability to monitor production issues and easily find the root cause in the application. We can quickly fix issues at the point of occurrence, and real-time metrics for microservices provide centralized logging and automated alerts that enable fast incident detection, quicker troubleshooting, and better application reliability, ultimately reducing operational efforts by giving engineers a single platform for monitoring AWS resources and microservices. I have seen many positive outcomes in my organization, estimating that CloudWatch reduced troubleshooting time by around thirty to forty percent because engineers could correlate metrics and logging from a single platform. Early alerts also help us resolve many performance issues before they escalate into major incidents, contributing to improved service availability.
LB
Senior Consultant at Skillfield
Offers robust out-of-the-box integrations and streamlines logging processes effortlessly
There are improvements needed for Elastic Stack. It is mostly based on Lucene, and the heart of Elastic Stack is Lucene, which has some limitations. Anything built on top of Lucene often feels an add-on, and that includes vector databases. Elastic Stack can store vector embeddings as well and perform AI and machine learning tasks out of the box without excessive configuration. The main improvements involve increasing speed and compression capabilities; I have seen databases that claim to achieve significantly better compression. While Elastic Stack can manage vast amounts of data, if the mapping is not specified correctly, the indexing time can be slow, especially with many events per second. Improper mapping usually means that every document received gets indexed for all fields, which is not desired. Elastic consultants typically optimize this, but out of the box, as data volume increases, scaling becomes necessary. They are working on these improvements in new versions.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"CloudWatch is good to use for infrastructure monitoring and workload monitoring on AWS."
"Our project involved processing billions of records and performance expectancy was 99% which is pretty impressive."
"Every time we get an alarm or have an incident, CloudWatch is always there. We use it not only for resources we've spun up in the cloud, but also for some of our on-premises resources."
"The solution offers very detailed metrics for their services."
"In Amazon CloudWatch, I found their data analytics services most valuable."
"The solution effectively monitors golden signals like CPU, page requests, and queues."
"The portability that we have in Amazon is great."
"It offers direct integrations with various storage providers, making it convenient to push logs from CloudWatch to these external platforms."
"The tool is huge, and it performs brilliantly. I tested it for malware, and within two weeks of launching, the product alerted me about a network intrusion. This was a tough test for it, but it performed admirably. The alerting system is excellent, and searching through logs is incredibly efficient. What's impressive is that all three products or options are integrated into one solution. This means I don't need separate logging, monitoring, or antivirus solutions."
"I think the ecosystem is well supported, and for logs, it was faster compared to our previous previous log management."
"It is a very scalable solution...I didn't face any problem with this scalability part of the solution since we only have a few pieces of equipment in our company."
"The only beneficial aspect of Elastic Stack is that it's open source."
"The machine learning capabilities are valuable."
"It supports various integrations. It's open source and has excellent community support."
"The tool's most powerful aspect is its search engine capability. It's a highly effective and powerful solution for searching. We use it in professional and student projects at universities, and it delivers promising results."
"Elastic Stack is mainly used to monitor servers and APIs. It helps ensure the software's availability and sends notifications at the right time so the system is not down for a long time. The tool's stability and advanced features, such as anomaly detection, are the most valuable features. The benefit of using it is real-time monitoring."
 

Cons

"Adding conditional expressions would enhance its functionality."
"The technical support must be improved."
"When customers want to see the CPU or memory utilization there is a cost. This should be free to see the utilization."
"I think the machine learning aspect of it probably does help because machine learning is not really machine learning."
"Amazon CloudWatch's pricing needs improvement."
"There could be further enhancements through CloudWatch's partnerships."
"Amazon CloudWatch has all the data, but to see what is happening, you need some third-party tool."
"It's not an advanced way of monitoring."
"The main issue related to Elastic Stack is in the area of its licensing."
"AI-enablement would be a big improvement in Elastic Stack...If there is room for an ML model in Elastic Stack, then it would be good."
"Elastic Stack's search capabilities can be challenging, especially when searching for precise data from past years, such as two or ten years ago. Its indexing performance for exact data retrieval may decrease as the data volume grows. Therefore, I believe there is room for improvement in the product's search functionality. It needs to improve its pricing as well."
"It lacks a clear NDR (Network Detection and Response) feature. If Elastic could enhance this aspect, it would significantly boost its capabilities."
"The tool's pricing can be improved."
"When people try to move the data from another source to Elastic Stack for visualization, they face challenges when connecting to Elastic Stack from such different sources."
"The implementation of dashboards in the solution needs to be made easier...I had some issues with the ports and configuration since it was kind of complex to implement with Docker."
"The stability of the solution is rated as three or four out of ten as we frequently encounter issues."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Amazon CloudWatch is reasonable. When the rate of data collection is done the price will increase. The price is less than other solutions."
"The pricing model is pay-as-you-go so you have to be mindful of usage to manage costs."
"The tool is not expensive."
"The product's cost is relatively inexpensive."
"I consider it as a medium-priced solution."
"The price is okay for me."
"What's were using is the free service of Amazon CloudWatch, so they're not charging us. As for hidden fees, we're not aware of them because we're using what our clients provided us."
"Amazon CloudWatch has very cheap pricing, and it hardly costs my company $25-$30 a month for fifty systems, so it's pretty affordable."
"If I compare Elastic Stack to the other products in the market, I would say that the tool is available at a competitive price."
"I used the open-source version of Elastic Stack, because of which I did not have to pay anything."
"I rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten."
"The product is expensive."
"Ultimately, the pricing depends upon the capacity planning that the enterprise architect does."
"We are using the open-source community version of the product."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"It depends on the specifics, but generally, Elastic is economical for certain use cases."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise7
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon CloudWatch?
The experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Amazon CloudWatch has been positive. It was very easy to set up because it is built into AWS and does not require separate licensing, bein...
What needs improvement with Amazon CloudWatch?
For improvements, I think Amazon CloudWatch could enhance certain areas, particularly regarding pricing structure. I wish to see simpler pricing, more intuitive dashboards, easier log queries for b...
What is your primary use case for Amazon CloudWatch?
My main use case for Amazon CloudWatch is the monitoring and analytics of the application servers. I basically use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the microservices and AWS infrastructure, helping me ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Stack?
My experience with Elastic Stack pricing indicates that it is node-based. While I do not have complete pricing details, they are available online. If I choose Elastic Cloud, it includes licensing a...
What needs improvement with Elastic Stack?
I would like to improve Elastic Stack by addressing the current big problem we face with importing logs and log files, such as syslogs. To import these log files, we need to design the ingest pipel...
What is your primary use case for Elastic Stack?
Elastic Stack is primarily used for everything related to security, including security systems, checking the security system, and also servers and networks.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AirAsia, Airbnb, Aircel, APUS, Avazu, Casa & Video, Futbol Club Barcelona (FCBarcelona), National Taiwan University, redBus
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Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon CloudWatch vs. Elastic Stack and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
920,929 professionals have used our research since 2012.