Tool profile
Search and analytics platform for logs, security, observability, and large-scale data exploration.
SOC platforms consolidating detections on indexed events
Elastic sells Elasticsearch, Kibana, Elastic Agent, and solution packs for search, observability, and security as Elastic Cloud SaaS or self-managed subscriptions.
elastic.co/pricing (March 2026) contrasts Hosted deployments (you choose hardware shape—resource-based pay-as-you-go or prepaid monthly) with Serverless projects that auto-scale on usage-based pricing for Search, Observability, or Security. Self-managed uses subscription tiers (Platinum, Enterprise) priced from node count and RAM under Elastic’s license model. 99.95% monthly uptime SLA appears for Platinum and Enterprise cloud tiers on the comparison grid.
Elasticsearch, Kibana, and many agents remain open source under current licenses—commercial features differ by tier. Always align procurement with solution SKU (search-only versus full SIEM).
Quick fit
Editorial take
Elastic now has a more concrete public hosted pricing ladder than this entry currently suggests. The main editorial job is separating hosted minimums, serverless usage pricing, and self-managed licensing so buyers are not comparing three different pricing models as if they were one.
What it does well
Primary use cases
Fit notes
Compare with
Pressure-test this pick against nearby alternatives.
Apache Kafka
Free planEvent streaming and event-driven architectures
Open-source distributed event streaming platform for high-throughput pipelines, pub/sub, and stream-processing ecosystems.
Choose Kafka when replayable event streams and ecosystem breadth matter more than the lightest possible operational footprint.
Pricing snapshot
Elastic's pricing page now clearly separates Elastic Cloud Hosted, Elastic Cloud Serverless, and self-managed subscriptions. Elastic Cloud Hosted starts as low as $99 per month for Standard, $114 for Gold, $131 for Platinum, and $184 for Enterprise on Elastic's published reference configuration. Serverless stays usage-based by solution, and self-managed licensing remains RAM and node based. Elastic also offers a cloud free trial.
Arcjet
Free planApplication runtime security
Runtime security toolkit for modern applications and AI systems that helps teams enforce quotas, block bots, prevent prompt abuse, and ship app-level protections in code.
Closer to application-runtime security and abuse-prevention tooling than to classic perimeter appliances.
