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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
8th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
66
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (5th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (15th), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (5th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (8th)
Elastic Stack
Ranking in Log Management
10th
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 January 2026, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Elastic Security is 2.9%, down from 4.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Stack is 4.0%, down from 4.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Security2.9%
Elastic Stack4.0%
Other93.1%
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

"The cost is reasonable. It's not overly pricey."
"I like the indexing of the logs."
"Elastic Security is cost-effective compared to Defender and CrowdStrike."
"It's open-source and free to use."
"It is very quick to react. I can set it to check anomalies or suspicious behavior every 30 seconds. It is very fast."
"The performance is good and it is faster than IBM QRadar."
"Elastic Security is very easy to adapt."
"What customers found most valuable in Elastic Security feature-wise is the search capability, in particular, the way of writing the search query and the speed of searching for results."
"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 scripting model in Elastic Stack allows me to query logs and then put the data into Grafana."
"It is an excellent tool for monitoring purposes."
"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 have benefited from the security features provided by X-Pack in Elastic Stack, particularly the SIEM capability, which is very good for checking security issues."
"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."
"The detection rules in Elastic Stack are the most valuable feature. The search capabilities are excellent and fast. As we collect logs from workstations and devices, the detection rules run on top of the logs and detect any suspicious activity, raising alerts accordingly. Integration with Elastic Stack depends on the specific integration. Elastic provides some bridging integrations that make it easy, but require custom integration. Most integrations are simple, but customization can be challenging because we need to do some parsing. There's something called Elastic Common Schema, and we need to parse the source logs to match this schema, which can be a bit challenging."
"I have experienced a return on investment from the use of the solution."
 

Cons

"There are connectors to gather logs for Windows PCs and Linux PCs, but if we have to get the logs from Syslog then we have to do it manually, and this should be automated."
"There should be a simulation environment to check whether my Elastic implementation is functioning perfectly fine. Other solutions have their own Android and iOS applications that I can install on my mobile so that I am continuously connected to the SIEM."
"This solution is very hard to implement."
"The tool needs to integrate with legacy servers. Big companies can have legacy servers that may not always be updated."
"The solution should generate an automatic product that integrates with ELK Stack to use artificial intelligence."
"Email notification should be done the same way as Logentries does it."
"Their visuals and graphs need to be better."
"The interface could be more user friendly because it is sometimes hard to deal with."
"Support could be improved. The error code is not helpful. We have to ask for it or pass it on to community forums."
"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."
"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."
"Elastic Stack should work on their dashboards and integration process."
"There could be better documentation."
"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."
"I would rate the technical support by Elastic as five or six out of ten. They should improve their response time and first-level support, particularly knowledge, which is very important for using Elasticsearch."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's a monthly cost with Elastic SIEM, but I am not sure of the exact cost."
"I can say that the product is cheaply priced."
"The base product is open-source but if you need advanced security features then you need to pay for the subscription. Elastic Security's price is reasonable in some cases and in other cases it's not."
"Elastic Security is free to use."
"I find it better than Splunk in terms of cost-effectiveness. For cost-effectiveness, I would rate it a nine out of 10."
"When compared to other products, the price is average or on the low side."
"There is no charge for using the open-source version."
"This is an open-source product, so there are no costs."
"It depends on the specifics, but generally, Elastic is economical for certain use cases."
"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 pricing is reasonable."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business40
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise15
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise6
 

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 do you like most about Elastic Security?
Elastic provides the capability to index quickly due to the reverse indexes it offers. This data is crucial as it contains critical information. The reverse index allows fast data indexing because ...
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 do you like most about Elastic Stack?
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 per...
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...
 

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: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.