Elasticsearch is a free, open-source search and analytics engine ideal for cost-conscious organizations with technical expertise, while Splunk is a proprietary enterprise platform with advanced machine learning features and dedicated support, commanding premium pricing starting at $3,000+ annually. The choice depends on budget constraints and required feature complexity.
Elasticsearch vs Splunk — Side-by-side comparison on A Versus B
Choose Elasticsearch if you have in-house technical teams, need cost-effective log aggregation at scale, and can invest time in maintenance and configuration. Choose Splunk if you require advanced machine learning analytics, prefer minimal setup overhead, need guaranteed enterprise support, and have regulatory compliance requirements with built-in certifications.
Proprietary distributed search and analytics engine by Elastic with cloud-native architecture.
Data analytics and SIEM platform for log aggregation, monitoring, and operational intelligence.
Elasticsearch vs Splunk — Comparison Data
Structured comparison data for Elasticsearch vs Splunk with 215 attributes.
Monthly Cost (100GB index, 1M queries/month)
Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) Improvement
Total Cost of Ownership (3-year, 500GB/month ingestion)
Required Infrastructure Team Size (100 users)
Typical Query Latency (1B rows, GROUP BY)
Annual Licensing Cost (Small Deployment)
Starting Annual Cost (single user/endpoint)
Default Data Retention (included in pricing)
Base Monthly Pricing (1GB/day ingestion)
Maximum Data Ingestion Per Day (Enterprise)
Starting Price (Annual, 100 Endpoints/1TB Data)
Elasticsearch vs Splunk — Attribute Category Vocabulary
Taxonomy of attribute categories used to classify comparison data for Elasticsearch vs Splunk.
How much does Splunk cost compared to Elasticsearch?
Elasticsearch is free open-source (self-hosted) but requires infrastructure and operational costs of $5,000–$15,000 annually for a small team. Splunk Cloud starts at $3,000–$5,000 annually for entry-level deployments but scales to $50,000+ for large organizations with high data volume. For 100GB/day ingestion, Elasticsearch with infrastructure typically costs $12,000/year, while Splunk costs $30,000+/year in licensing alone.
Which is better for log aggregation and monitoring?
Elasticsearch excels at raw log aggregation speed and cost-efficiency, processing terabytes of logs daily without per-gigabyte charges. Splunk wins for production monitoring with pre-built dashboards, alerting, and threat detection. Choose Elasticsearch for log storage/search; choose Splunk for comprehensive operational insights with minimal configuration.
Can Elasticsearch handle enterprise-scale deployments?
Yes, Elasticsearch powers log pipelines at Netflix, Uber, and Goldman Sachs processing petabytes daily. However, enterprise deployments require dedicated DevOps teams for cluster management, security hardening, and disaster recovery. Splunk Cloud provides this infrastructure automatically, making it lower-risk for organizations without deep Kubernetes expertise.
What are the machine learning differences?
Elasticsearch ML offers basic anomaly detection, forecasting, and outlier identification—sufficient for standard use cases. Splunk ML Toolkit provides 15+ advanced models including predictive analytics, event correlation, clustering, and supervised learning with custom algorithms. For predictive security threat detection, Splunk is significantly more capable.
Which meets regulatory compliance requirements?
Splunk includes built-in certifications: HIPAA, SOC2 Type II, PCI-DSS, FedRAMP, GDPR, and ISO 27001. Elasticsearch requires manual implementation of security controls and auditing to meet these standards. For regulated industries (healthcare, finance, government), Splunk's pre-certified architecture reduces compliance risk by 6-12 months.