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Elastic Observability vs Grafana Enterprise Stack 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

Elastic Observability
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (7th), Log Management (15th), Container Monitoring (4th), Cloud Monitoring Software (7th)
Grafana Enterprise Stack
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
25th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Elastic Observability is 3.8%, down from 4.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana Enterprise Stack is 0.8%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Adelina Craciun - PeerSpot reviewer
Customization enables tailored monitoring and alerting across departments
The possibility to customize it has been quite useful. Whatever the other departments want to dream up, we implement. Whatever they want to monitor, the granularity of it, the changes in the threshold, and the anomalies that they want reported all require some development. So far, every single request has been fulfilled.
Gregory Diana - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers very good charting capabilities and capable of automatically generating dashboards, even for a large number of data points
In terms of what Grafana provides, it just provides the charting tools. Everything else is third-party. It's like Node-RED. Node-RED is free, and you can choose an application, but that application depends on the person who's supporting it. If they decide not to support it, then you're stuck. However, I believe that it can't be improved or changed because people have to make money and make a living from it. Nothing will ever be changed. It depends on the software. Same as Windward. Windward just decided it could not support a large number of customers, so it focused on high-income, low-volume clients. Whereas Node-RED has millions of followers and fantastic support, the same as Grafana. Grafana is partly free, but it's your problem. That's how all these companies work. If you're big and you pay a lot of money, they'll pay attention to you.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The price is very less expensive compared to the other solutions."
"I recommend Elastic Observability for its completeness of vision and wide ecosystem."
"Elastic provides built-in features for queries and report generation. It's a very good tool for monitoring integration capabilities."
"Elastic APM has plenty of features, such as the Elastic server for Kibana and many additional plugins. It's a comprehensive tool when used as a logging platform."
"It is scalable and supports multitenancy, which is beneficial for MSPs."
"I found Elk to be excellent for log analytics, security analytics, application code-level analytics, collaboration with DevOps teams, CI/CD, microservices, and Kubernetes, specifically cloud-native or cloud-specific tasks."
"The solution is open-source and helps with back-end logging. It is also easy to handle."
"The solution allows us to dig deep into data."
"The most valuable features of Grafana for data visualization are its ability to create intuitive dashboards and its wide range of visualization options like graphs, charts, and tables."
"Grafana's full observability stack, known as LGTM, is highly valuable."
"Our productivity has improved with its use."
"The dashboards are pretty good."
"Grafana has enough features around dashboard management. It's got enough plugins to create your dashboards."
"The most valuable feature of Grafana Enterprise Stack is the dashboards."
"Grafana's full observability stack, known as LGTM, is highly valuable."
"Grafana's most valuable feature is its ability to provide a graphical representation of data collected from various sources."
 

Cons

"Elastic Observability’s price could be improved."
"Elastic Observability needs to have better standardization, logging, and schema."
"There is room for improvement regarding its APM capabilities."
"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 is reactive rather than proactive. It should act as an ITSM tool and be able to create tickets and alerts on Jira."
"More web features could be added to the product."
"Elastic APM's visualization is not that great compared to other tools. It's number of metrics is very low."
"Integrating AI capabilities for automated self-healing and reduced manual interventions would be valuable."
"In terms of what Grafana provides, it just provides the charting tools. Everything else is third-party."
"The tool needs to show only fewer updates."
"The connection between metrics, logs, and traces could be improved."
"I find Grafana really hard to configure. It's difficult to build the dashboard, and it's non-intuitive. In my opinion, it's very difficult to work with Grafana."
"They could use more small tutorials to explain a bit about how Grafana works."
"I have encountered occasional issues with false inputs or incorrect data in Grafana."
"The connection between metrics, logs, and traces could be improved. Currently, one needs to ingest labels and timestamps for them to be connected, however, drilling down sometimes takes time."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Elastic Observability's pricing could be better for small-scale users."
"Users have to pay for some features, like the alerts on different channels, because they are unavailable in different source versions."
"Elastic Observability is cheaper than other similar solutions, such as Dynatrace. Its license calculation is based on various factors like data volume and physical infrastructure, particularly related to RAM capacity."
"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."
"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."
"The product is not that cheap."
"Since we are a huge company, Elastic Observability is an affordable solution for us."
"One needs to pay for the licenses, and it is an annual subscription model right now."
"I use the tool's free license."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Energy/Utilities Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Elastic Observability?
Elastic Observability significantly improves incident response time by providing quick access to logs and data across various sources. For instance, searching for specific keywords in logs spanning...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Observability?
Elastic Observability is cost-efficient and provides all features in the enterprise license without asset-based licensing. However, sizing and licensing information could be clearer.
What needs improvement with Elastic Observability?
Of course, maintenance is necessary, as with any software, requiring updates with the latest features and security enhancements. It lacked some capabilities when handling on-prem devices, like netw...
What do you like most about Grafana Enterprise Stack?
The tool's most valuable feature is real-time monitoring. It helps in securing the application or the node by allowing us to monitor and manage resource consumption during peak times. For instance,...
What needs improvement with Grafana Enterprise Stack?
From an analytics perspective, the integration of AI would be a beneficial improvement for Grafana Enterprise Stack.
What is your primary use case for Grafana Enterprise Stack?
Our primary use case for Grafana Enterprise Stack includes monitoring cluster utilization, taking care of impact avoidance, conducting upgrades, ensuring storage memory does not become full, and id...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

PSCU, Entel, VITAS, Mimecast, Barrett Steel, Butterfield Bank
1. Uber 2. PayPal 3. eBay 4. Sony 5. Red Hat 6. IBM 7. Cisco 8. Adobe 9. Expedia 10. Booking.com 11. Airbnb 12. LinkedIn 13. Twitter 14. Netflix 15. Spotify 16. Pinterest 17. Slack 18. GitLab 19. Docker 20. Atlassian 21. Salesforce 22. Microsoft 23. Google 24. Amazon 25. Facebook 26. Apple 27. Intel 28. Oracle 29. SAP 30. VMware 31. HP 32. Dell
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Observability vs. Grafana Enterprise Stack and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.