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Elastic Observability vs Scout APM comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Elastic Observability
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
10th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (13th), Log Management (14th), Container Monitoring (6th), Cloud Monitoring Software (11th)
Scout APM
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
84th
Average Rating
10.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Elastic Observability is 1.6%, down from 4.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Scout APM is 0.4%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Elastic Observability1.6%
Scout APM0.4%
Other98.0%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Stefan Decuypere - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Consultant at Hybrid software
Real-time dashboards and visual insights have streamlined issue analysis and monitoring
After careful consideration about areas for improvement in Elastic Observability, aspects such as pricing, customization, implementation, and scalability could be improved. As a user of the system, I know what it costs but am not directly involved in cost-benefit evaluations or maintenance, which is handled by another team. I develop the visual representation of the data and frankly, I don't see major gaps in my application or anything I would really miss; I appreciate the fast pace of the developments that have occurred in the last couple of years. Regarding room for improvement in Elastic Observability, I would have preferred built-in tools to manage the indexes on deployment for better visual representation, as the initial feedback regarding system performance and data storage was fairly primitive and lacking.
Antonio_Barros - PeerSpot reviewer
Regional Manager LatAm at Splunk
Great visibility and reliability with fair pricing
The solution is stable. It's pretty easy to set up, especially if you have the knowledge base and/or you have a partner assist you. The product can scale. The processes are great. It helps with services and microservices. The product is great for man different industries, including energy, government, finance, and more.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The ability to ensure that the data is searchable and maintainable is highly valuable for our purposes."
"The product has connectors to many services."
"The Elastic User Interface framework lets us do custom development when needed. You need to have some Javascript knowledge. We need that knowledge to develop new custom tests."
"The solution allows us to track performance via metrics and we're able to see where latency is happening."
"The tool's most valuable feature is centralized logging. Elastic Common Search helps us to search for the logs across the organization."
"Its diverse set of features available on the cloud is of significant importance."
"From my experience with several major customers, the most valued feature of Elastic is its log analytics capabilities."
"The very positive features are the cost effectiveness and the range of things that you can implement."
"Everything that is around the digital performance environment, I can see."
"The product can scale."
 

Cons

"The cost must be made more transparent."
"I would advise others to use a different solution than Elastic APM."
"The auto-discovery isn't nearly as good. That's a big portion of it. When you drop the agent onto the JVM and you're trying to figure things out, having to go through and manually do all that is cumbersome."
"There could be more low-code features included in the product."
"When opening tickets, we cannot use our team mailbox."
"Simplifying the parsing of logs and manual efforts would also be beneficial."
"Elastic Observability needs to improve the retrieval of logs and metrics from all the instances."
"I would have preferred built-in tools to manage the indexes on deployment for better visual representation, as the initial feedback regarding system performance and data storage was fairly primitive and lacking."
"I can't recall coming across any missing features."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have been using the open-source version."
"There are two types: cloud and SaaS. They charge based on data ingestion, ingest rate, hard retention, and warm retention. I believe it costs around $25,000 annually to ingest 30GB of data daily. That is the SaaS version. There is also a self-managed license where the customer manages their own infrastructure on-prem. In such cases, there are three license tiers that respectively cost $5,000 annually per node, $7,000 per node, and $12,500 per node."
"Elastic Observability is cheaper than other similar solutions, such as Dynatrace. Its license calculation is based on various factors like data volume and physical infrastructure, particularly related to RAM capacity."
"The product’s pricing needs improvement."
"So far, there are just the standard licensing fees. Several of the components are embedded in the license or are even open source. They're even free depending on what you use, which makes it even more appealing to someone that is discussing pricing of the solution."
"Elastic Observability's pricing could be better for small-scale users."
"Pricing is one of those situations where the more you use it, the more you pay."
"One needs to pay for the licenses, and it is an annual subscription model right now."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Construction Company
13%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Retailer
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise16
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Observability?
The problem is their licensing model, which is a bit confusing. Many customers struggle to understand their total cost of ownership because Elastic licensing is not dependent on easy, quantifiable ...
What needs improvement with Elastic Observability?
After careful consideration about areas for improvement in Elastic Observability, aspects such as pricing, customization, implementation, and scalability could be improved. As a user of the system,...
What is your primary use case for Elastic Observability?
My use case for Elastic Observability is observability, as we upload our customers' data, including logs, and when there is an issue, we can analyze what went wrong.
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Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

PSCU, Entel, VITAS, Mimecast, Barrett Steel, Butterfield Bank
Chargify, Synctree, Aptuitiv, Barnes and Noble, Journey, Geosnapshot, Kongregate, PaperTrail, Adobe, SendGrid, Sentry
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. Updated: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.