Tool profile
Distributed search and analytics engine for full text search, logs, metrics, and large data sets.
Large-scale log and trace retention with Kibana dashboards
Distributed search and analytics engine from Elastic—full-text search, aggregations, and observability stacks at huge scale.
Commercial access runs through Elastic packaging: Elastic Cloud deployments charge for instance size, storage, and features per region; serverless products meter ingestion and retention differently; self-managed licenses scale with RAM or node counts. elastic.co/pricing and the deployment wizard are authoritative—this entry is the search engine SKU buyers compare to OpenSearch and Meilisearch.
Treat mapping changes, shard counts, and ILM as cost levers, not afterthoughts.
Quick fit
Editorial take
Elasticsearch should not imply one blended Elastic bill. The right framing is still hosted versus serverless versus self-managed, but the hosted product now has public starting prices that are better than hand-wavy calculator-only wording.
What it does well
Primary use cases
Fit notes
Compare with
Pressure-test this pick against nearby alternatives.
Pricing snapshot
Elastic's pricing pages position Elasticsearch across three commercial models: Elastic Cloud Hosted with public starting prices from $99 per month on the reference configuration, Elastic Cloud Serverless with usage-based pricing, and self-managed subscriptions licensed by RAM and node usage. Elastic also offers a free cloud trial.
Alation
PaidEnterprise data catalog
Enterprise data intelligence and catalog platform for search, governance, trust, and AI-ready knowledge layers over organizational data.
Choose Alation when the buying problem is enterprise trust, governance, and discoverability across data assets.
