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Amazon CloudWatch vs Elastic Stack comparison

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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

Amazon CloudWatch
Ranking in Log Management
19th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
49
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (24th), Cloud Monitoring Software (15th)
Elastic Stack
Ranking in Log Management
23rd
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 November 2026, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Amazon CloudWatch is 1.3%, down from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Stack is 1.6%, down from 4.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon CloudWatch1.3%
Elastic Stack1.6%
Other97.1%
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Azam S M - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Lead at Danat Fz LLC
Has provided reliable monitoring and alerting through extensive metric tracking and dashboard configuration
Amazon CloudWatch itself provides a lot of data. However, for visualization, we need to use third-party tools. We are in a process of integrating Grafana, Loki, and Prometheus to have better visualization on Amazon CloudWatch. We are also integrating Grafana with the application itself to get the application data and logs. Alternatively, there is AWS Kinesis and Glue where you can scrape the logs and have visualization, but a more easy option is Grafana. If you want to get a proper visual representation to see what is happening, then you need to integrate a third-party tool. Amazon CloudWatch has all the data, but to see what is happening, you need some third-party tool.
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

"Scheduling is a valuable feature."
"It's stable, the performance is good, it's reliable, there are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze."
"The scalability of Amazon CloudWatch rates as high scalability, scoring a perfect ten."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is collecting the logs from Lambda."
"The monitoring features are valuable."
"The tool's UI is good. One can scroll through the logs very easily."
"It's useful to analyze past data and compare it with recent activities."
"We are able to, on a real-time basis, understand the capacity utilization and the latency aspects, and, to that extent, we can now know the productivity of the tests and if the development team has increased them in any way."
"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 tool's most powerful aspect is its search engine capability. It's a highly effective and powerful solution for searching. We use it in professional and student projects at universities, and it delivers promising results."
"The only beneficial aspect of Elastic Stack is that it's open source."
"It supports various integrations. It's open source and has excellent community support."
"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."
"The scripting model in Elastic Stack allows me to query logs and then put the data into Grafana."
"I have experienced a return on investment from the use of the solution."
"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."
 

Cons

"The solution should provide human-readable metrics."
"The solution's pricing is a bit higher."
"CloudWatch doesn’t monitor disk throughput by default."
"Maybe Amazon Web Services can improve by providing a library for CloudWatch with some useful features."
"The solution could benefit from a price decrease."
"Incorporating a straightforward method or a plug-and-play solution for integrating these databases with our systems, facilitating smooth data transfer, and enabling the creation of dashboards for monitoring and analysis would be beneficial."
"For improvements, I think Amazon CloudWatch could enhance certain areas, particularly regarding pricing structure."
"I think the machine learning aspect of it probably does help because machine learning is not really machine learning."
"It should facilitate easier manual integration."
"It lacks a clear NDR (Network Detection and Response) feature. If Elastic could enhance this aspect, it would significantly boost its capabilities."
"Support could be improved. The error code is not helpful. We have to ask for it or pass it on to community forums."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The stability of the solution is rated as three or four out of ten as we frequently encounter issues."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive."
"The pricing model is pay-as-you-go so you have to be mindful of usage to manage costs."
"The price of Amazon CloudWatch is reasonable. When the rate of data collection is done the price will increase. The price is less than other solutions."
"Amazon CloudWatch is a cheap solution."
"It is a free-of-charge service."
"The product's cost is relatively inexpensive."
"The price is okay for me."
"The tool is not expensive."
"If I compare Elastic Stack to the other products in the market, I would say that the tool is available at a competitive price."
"It depends on the specifics, but generally, Elastic is economical for certain use cases."
"The product is expensive."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"I used the open-source version of Elastic Stack, because of which I did not have to pay anything."
"We are using the open-source community version of the product."
"Ultimately, the pricing depends upon the capacity planning that the enterprise architect does."
"I rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise7
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon CloudWatch?
The experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Amazon CloudWatch has been positive. It was very easy to set up because it is built into AWS and does not require separate licensing, bein...
What needs improvement with Amazon CloudWatch?
For improvements, I think Amazon CloudWatch could enhance certain areas, particularly regarding pricing structure. I wish to see simpler pricing, more intuitive dashboards, easier log queries for b...
What is your primary use case for Amazon CloudWatch?
My main use case for Amazon CloudWatch is the monitoring and analytics of the application servers. I basically use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the microservices and AWS infrastructure, helping me ...
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.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AirAsia, Airbnb, Aircel, APUS, Avazu, Casa & Video, Futbol Club Barcelona (FCBarcelona), National Taiwan University, redBus
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Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon CloudWatch vs. Elastic Stack and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.