Amazon CloudWatch Logs vs Elastic Observability
Amazon CloudWatch Logs
aws.amazon.com
Elastic Observability
elastic.coSide by side
| Figure | Amazon CloudWatch Logs | Elastic Observability |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.03/mo | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 5 | 2 |
| Spec score · Log Analysis Software | 9.2 (#1) | 8.2 (#11) |
| Spec score · Log Management Software | 9.2 (#5) | 8.4 (#34) |
| Spec score · Log Monitoring Tools | 9.1 (#5) | 8.2 (#13) |
| Archive export | Yes | Yes |
| Deployment options | cloud | Elastic lists Serverless, Hosted, and self-managed deployment options for Observability; Serverless is fully managed, while self-managed deployments can run on customer infrastructure. |
| Founded | 2006 | 2012 |
| Headquarters | Seattle, Washington, United States | Amsterdam, Netherlands and Mountain View, California, United States |
| Integrations | CloudWatch Logs integrates with Amazon OpenSearch Service for querying and analyzing logs without moving or duplicating the data. | Elastic says its Serverless offering includes over 350 integrations, and its infrastructure monitoring overview lists more than 400 out-of-the-box integrations. |
| Live Tail | Live Tail provides interactive real-time analysis of streaming log data from a central view. | Yes |
| Log pipelines | Yes | Yes |
| Purpose | Amazon CloudWatch collects and stores logs from AWS resources, applications, services, on-premises resources, and other clouds. | Elastic Observability unifies application and infrastructure monitoring by bringing logs, metrics, application traces, user experience data, and other telemetry together for analysis. |
| Structured log parsing | Yes | Yes |
| Support | The CloudWatch page directs users with questions to contact AWS. | For Serverless, limited support is included with a Standard subscription; the listed Gold, Platinum, and Enterprise support charges are 5%, 10%, and 15% of consumption. |
Plans
Amazon CloudWatch Logs
- Logs data ingestion$0.50 a month
- Logs archive storage$0.03 a month
- Pay-as-you-goPrice not published
- Free tierFree
- Paid usagePrice not published
Elastic Observability
- Observability Serverless CompletePrice not published
- Observability Serverless Logs EssentialsPrice not published
In their own words
Amazon CloudWatch Logs
Amazon CloudWatch Logs collects and stores logs from AWS resources, applications, services, on-premises systems, and other clouds. It offers log pipelines, structured parsing, archive export, and live tailing through web and API access. Logs Insights lets users query records with filters, aggregations, and regular expressions, then visualize time-series data or export results to CloudWatch Dashboards. Logs are available in Standard for real-time monitoring and advanced analytics, or Infrequent Access for ad-hoc queries and forensic analysis. Live Tail provides a central interactive view of streaming logs, while anomaly detection uses machine learning to identify patterns and changes. Users can search and analyze logs across accounts from a monitoring account at no additional cost. The free tier includes 5 GB for ingestion, archive storage, and query scans, plus 1,800 Live Tail minutes per month. Usage-based charges are billed at month end, with no upfront commitment or minimum fee; rates vary by Region.
Elastic Observability
Elastic Observability has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.