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Elastic Security vs Elastic Stack comparison

 

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

Elastic Security
Ranking in Log Management
11th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
66
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (7th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (15th), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (11th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (12th)
Elastic Stack
Ranking in Log Management
15th
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 August 2026, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Elastic Security is 3.5%, up from 2.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Stack is 1.9%, down from 5.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Elastic Security3.5%
Elastic Stack1.9%
Other94.6%
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Laurentiu Popescu - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Product Officer at ClusterPower
Has improved threat detection with deep log analysis and streamlined investigation workflows
The most useful features I find in Elastic Security are the forensic ones that allow us to carry deeper analysis into the logs for in-depth investigations, and the dashboards, with the reporting dashboard being quite user-friendly. Elastic Security is quite good at identifying threats, as it is part of the deep investigation tool that I mentioned before. Unless we need to look further into a certain log, we can carry out a deeper analysis and forensics on those particular logs. I can assess the impact of Elastic Security's real-time data analysis on our threat response efficiency as working pretty good. We are looking for real-time analysis because we have a continuous inflow of logs from different sources: from our cloud, from Active Directory, from our network. So it works pretty well.
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

"ELK documentation is very good, so never needed to contact technical support."
"Just the ability to do a lot more than just up-down is nice, which a lot of people take for granted."
"The tool's functionality is good for overall security and incident response times."
"Elastic has a lot of beats, such as Winlogbeat and Filebeat. Beats are the agents that have to be installed on the terminals to send the data. When we install beats or Elastic agents on every terminal, they don't overload the terminals. In other SIEM solutions such as Splunk or QRadar, when beats or agents are installed on endpoints, they are very heavy for the terminals. They consume a lot of power of the terminals, whereas Elastic agents hardly consume any power and don't overload the terminals."
"The performance is good and it is faster than IBM QRadar."
"We chose Elastic Security because we felt it was the most flexible, cost-effective solution to provide the results needed."
"We like the detailed investigation features of the platform as you're able to get a lot of detail as to what's going on on the host when you do investigations."
"Elastic Security is very easy to adapt."
"The centralized logging capabilities of Elastic Stack have helped me streamline my logging processes significantly because there are many open-source tools available, such as Filebeat and Logstash, to collect the logs."
"The only beneficial aspect of Elastic Stack is that it's open source."
"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."
"Elastic Stack has made a positive impact as we can now see our logs."
"The biggest strength of Elastic Stack is its brilliant archiving capabilities."
"We can group a lot of alarms into one automation alarm supervision. The alarm supervision allows us to put the alarm under the same. It's quite helpful for us. We used that to suppress our alarms. Elastic already provides the agent. It is easy to integrate Elastic Stack with other devices and vendors."
"I think the ecosystem is well supported, and for logs, it was faster compared to our previous previous log management."
"It is an excellent tool for monitoring purposes."
 

Cons

"We'd like better premium support."
"The interface could be more user friendly because it is sometimes hard to deal with."
"Configuring the server is difficult and can be improved."
"Elastic sometimes does not correctly identify threats or anomalies. It might not classify an issue as malicious or critical accurately."
"I would say that right now the Linux feature set is a little limited."
"We'd like to see some more artificial intelligence capabilities."
"The solution's query building is not that intuitive compared to other solutions."
"The tool should improve its scalability."
"The main issue related to Elastic Stack is in the area of its licensing."
"Agent deployment is a little tough in the on-premise version."
"The solution is expensive, particularly the training and certification. If customers want to increase their use of Elastic Stack, they should consider reducing the cost of certification and training."
"There could be better documentation."
"It should facilitate easier manual integration."
"Elastic Stack should be more simplified with ready-to-use widgets. Also, incorporating AI capabilities is essential as monitoring and observability tools are now adding AI features."
"Elastic Stack should be more simplified with ready-to-use widgets."
"Support could be improved. The error code is not helpful. We have to ask for it or pass it on to community forums."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is free."
"Compared to other products such as Dynatrace, this is one of the cheaper options."
"We use the open-source version, so there is no charge for this solution."
"I find it better than Splunk in terms of cost-effectiveness. For cost-effectiveness, I would rate it a nine out of 10."
"It is easy to deploy, easy to use, and you get everything you need to become operational with it, and have nothing further to pay unless you want the OLED plugin."
"The price is reasonable. It probably costs the same as ArcSight and LogRhythm SIEM. FortiSIEM might cost less than Elastic Security. There are no hidden or additional costs."
"I can say that the product is cheaply priced."
"The licensing cost of Elastic Security is based on the daily ingestion rate. I can't recall the exact figure, but for 10GB of log action daily, it would cost around $20,000."
"If I compare Elastic Stack to the other products in the market, I would say that the tool is available at a competitive price."
"The product is expensive."
"We are using the open-source community version of the product."
"I rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"Ultimately, the pricing depends upon the capacity planning that the enterprise architect does."
"I used the open-source version of Elastic Stack, because of which I did not have to pay anything."
"It depends on the specifics, but generally, Elastic is economical for certain use cases."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
9%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business40
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise15
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise7
 

Questions from the Community

Datadog vs ELK: which one is good in terms of performance, cost and efficiency?
With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately using the dashboards we have created with Datadog; they are very good c...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Security?
I am satisfied with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing cost. It is a pure 10.
What needs improvement with Elastic Security?
I do not have any specific recommendations for improvements in Elastic Security, but I feel that the AI module should get more mature. These machine learning algorithms become better with time; as ...
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.
 

Also Known As

Elastic SIEM, ELK Logstash
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Texas A&M, U.S. Air Force, NuScale Power, Martin's Point Health Care
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Security vs. Elastic Stack and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.