Amazon GuardDuty vs Elastic Security

Amazon GuardDuty monitors AWS accounts and workloads for malicious activity and generates security findings for response. It analyzes CloudTrail, VPC Flow, DNS, S3, Aurora login, AWS Backup, AI workload, and runtime activity. Detection combines AI, machine learning, anomaly detection, and AWS and third-party threat intelligence. Runtime Monitoring covers EKS, ECS workloads including those on Fargate, and EC2 instances. GuardDuty can scan EC2-attached EBS volumes after suspicious activity and detect potentially harmful uploads to S3 buckets. AI Protection addresses threats such as unusual model invocations, cost harvesting, and prompt injection attempts in Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker workloads. Findings can go to AWS Security Hub, EventBridge, Amazon Detective, or third-party solutions. Foundational protections require no additional security software or infrastructure to deploy and maintain. The service is pay as you go: charges depend on analyzed data and vary by source and AWS Region. New accounts can receive a 30-day trial in supported Regions, and some features are unavailable in some Regions.

Elastic Security combines SIEM, XDR, endpoint security, and cloud security for detecting, preventing, and responding to cyber threats. Detection options include prebuilt and customizable rules, machine-learning anomaly detection, and threat hunting. Elastic Defend uses machine learning, behavioral analysis, and prebuilt rules to address endpoint threats; cloud capabilities cover cloud and Kubernetes security posture management, workload protection, and vulnerability management. Elastic Workflows can automate triage, enrichment, response, notifications, and case management. Elastic lists more than 400 prebuilt integrations and up to 1,000 total security and data-source integrations, alongside native OpenTelemetry support. The software can run on Elastic Cloud or self-managed infrastructure, with APIs and query options KQL, Lucene, and ES|QL. The free Basic plan includes SIEM, XDR, and host security analysis. Elastic Cloud Hosted and Serverless offer a 14-day free trial. Security Analytics Essentials is listed at $0.09 a month, with retention priced separately; Essentials also includes endpoint protection, while retention is priced separately at as low as $0.017 per retained GB per month. Elastic Cloud uses HTTPS for internet-facing and inter-node communications and encrypts cluster data at rest.