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Actional vs Elastic Observability comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 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

Actional
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
71st
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
SOA Governance (4th)
Elastic Observability
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
11th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (13th), Log Management (16th), Container Monitoring (5th), Cloud Monitoring Software (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Actional is 0.6%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Observability is 1.7%, down from 4.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Elastic Observability1.7%
Actional0.6%
Other97.7%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

it_user690762 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees
Provides speed and scaling in the cloud
Provides speed and scaling in the cloud Effortless scaling Never throws away data Takes action now Delivers analytics at the speed of business Automates and speeds up system discovery I would like to see better marketing. We have used this for four years. There are no deployment issues at this…
Mohammed-Abdelalim - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Vice President at QualityKiosk Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Has provided powerful customization for unique monitoring needs but needs more out-of-the-box capabilities
In my opinion, the best features of Elastic Observability are their flexibility to integrate with other existing systems and the ability to build a unified monitoring tool that can integrate with existing ones and end-to-end user journeys which require a lot of customizations. The greatest feature in Elastic is the ability to customize. This is similar to my comments about customizable dashboards in Elastic because it's visible to the analyst. However, it's very great. Customizing these dashboards can meet the customer's specific use cases and specific stories that they have in their environment, their special environment that doesn't look like other environments. The dashboarding in Elastic is highly customizable to the level of logos. If the customer wants his company logo in the dashboard, it can be done.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"From a testing standpoint, ignoring license and cost issues, it's not a bad product."
"This tool has great scaling capabilities, i.e., no limitations."
"It's easy to deploy, and it's very flexible."
"The ability to ensure that the data is searchable and maintainable is highly valuable for our purposes."
"I think Elastic Observability is already in very good shape."
"The most valuable feature of Elastic Observability is the text search."
"We can view and connect different sources to the dashboard using it."
"We use AppDynamics and Elastic. The reason why we're using Elastic APM is because of the license count. It's very favorable compared to AppDynamics. It's inexpensive; it's economical."
"The solution allows us to dig deep into data."
"The solution allows us to track performance via metrics and we're able to see where latency is happening."
 

Cons

"My concern is with Automation integration."
"Elastic Observability is reactive rather than proactive. It should act as an ITSM tool and be able to create tickets and alerts on Jira."
"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."
"There's a steep learning curve if you've never used this solution before."
"The solution needs to use more AI. Once the product onboards AI, users would more effectively be able to track endpoints for specific messages."
"Elastic Observability needs to improve the retrieval of logs and metrics from all the instances."
"There is room for improvement regarding its APM capabilities."
"More web features could be added to the product."
"Elastic Observability needs to have better standardization, logging, and schema."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The product is not that cheap."
"We have been using the open-source version."
"We will buy a premium license after POC."
"Pricing is one of those situations where the more you use it, the more you pay."
"The product’s pricing needs improvement."
"Elastic Observability's pricing could be better for small-scale users."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

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

Questions from the Community

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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.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Proximus, Air France-KLM, Barratt Developments, Freedom Mortgage
PSCU, Entel, VITAS, Mimecast, Barrett Steel, Butterfield Bank
Find out what your peers are saying about Actional vs. Elastic Observability and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.