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Change Auditor for Windows File Servers vs Elastic Security 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

Change Auditor for Windows ...
Ranking in Log Management
32nd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Elastic Security
Ranking in Log Management
10th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
65
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (5th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (16th), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (7th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Change Auditor for Windows File Servers is 0.2%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Security is 2.9%, down from 5.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

KF
Provides granular queries of security logs and real-time alerting helps me mitigate risks
The real-time alerting helps me mitigate risks. For example, someone adds a member to the domain admin group. We have an alert set up, so if someone does this unexpectedly, we get notified. Then, we can check and verify if the action is legitimate or a potential threat to the environment.
SyedAli17 - PeerSpot reviewer
Centralized monitoring improves security posture through rapid data processing
The processing part of Elastic Security ( /products/elastic-security-reviews ) is very interesting for us since we handle almost 7,000 to 8,000 alerts per minute. We require rapid processing speed for alerts and event data, and Elastic Security is very efficient at handling this level of data. Additionally, Elastic Security helps improve the security posture of Pakistan through centralized visibility and real-time processing.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"In terms of features, the querying is great."
"The solution's most valuable aspect is that it can be fully integrated with Microsoft solutions and it doesn't impact the productivity order."
"Elastic has a lot of beats, such as Winlogbeat and Filebeat. Beats are the agents that have to be installed on the terminals to send the data. When we install beats or Elastic agents on every terminal, they don't overload the terminals. In other SIEM solutions such as Splunk or QRadar, when beats or agents are installed on endpoints, they are very heavy for the terminals. They consume a lot of power of the terminals, whereas Elastic agents hardly consume any power and don't overload the terminals."
"Elastic Security is applied within my cyber defense strategy by utilizing many modules such as EDR, GenAI, SOAR module and combines with the SIEM module."
"The most valuable feature of Elastic Security is that you can install agents, and they are not separately licensed."
"Its flexibility is most valuable. We can have a number of scenarios, and we can get logs from anything. If we know how to use Logstash, we can tweak it in many ways. This makes the logging search on Elastic very easy."
"It is scalable."
"It's open-source and free to use."
"I like that it's a SIEM platform. I like that I can sell Elastic Security quickly. Elastic Security has a large community that can support users."
"I can look at events from more than one source across multiple different locations and find patterns or anomalies. The machine learning capabilities are helpful, and I can create rules for notifications to be more proactive rather than responding after something has gone wrong."
 

Cons

"The customer service and support could improve their approach to questioning issues. They tend to ask questions one at a time, which creates a lot of back-and-forth communication."
"The pricing could be improved. It needs to be reduced."
"Authentication is not a default in Kibana. We need to have another tool to have authentication and authorization. These two should be part of Kibana."
"There is an area of improvement in the Logs list. The load list may need to be paginated as there are limits."
"Elastic Security could improve the documentation. It would help if they were more simple and clean."
"It is difficult to anticipate and understand the space utilization, so more clarity there would be great."
"If the documentation were improved and made more clear for beginners, or even professionals, then we would be more attracted to this solution."
"There isn't really a very good user experience. You need a lot of training."
"We are paying dearly for the guy who is working on the ELK Stack. That knowledge is quite rare and hard to come by. For difficulty and availability of resources, I would rate it a five out of 10."
"The solution's query building is not that intuitive compared to other solutions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is per user. The cost is approximately $15/user on a yearly basis. If you need to, you can always upgrade as well."
"When compared to other products, the price is average or on the low side."
"The pricing is in the middle. I think it is not an expensive experience if we compare it with big names, for example, QRadar, and also Oxide. I think Elastic Security is quite cheap. I would rate the pricing of this solution a five out of ten."
"Elastic Stack is an open-source tool. You don't have to pay anything for the components."
"Compared to other products such as Dynatrace, this is one of the cheaper options."
"I can say that the product is cheaply priced."
"The licensing cost of Elastic Security is based on the daily ingestion rate. I can't recall the exact figure, but for 10GB of log action daily, it would cost around $20,000."
"It is easy to deploy, easy to use, and you get everything you need to become operational with it, and have nothing further to pay unless you want the OLED plugin."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
16%
Government
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Change Auditor for Windows File Servers?
They've already made improvements! They have a tool called IT Security Search, which lets you perform queries outside of Change Auditor. It's much faster. This is a really good addition and helps u...
What is your primary use case for Change Auditor for Windows File Servers?
I use Change Auditor for Windows File Servers to log history. It's helpful when we have critical changes in Active Directory, like adding or removing items. I use it extensively for monitoring.
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.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Elastic SIEM, ELK Logstash
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Dragon Capital, Howard County MD
Texas A&M, U.S. Air Force, NuScale Power, Martin's Point Health Care
Find out what your peers are saying about Change Auditor for Windows File Servers vs. Elastic Security and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
864,574 professionals have used our research since 2012.