ClickStack vs ELK Stack
ClickStack
clickhouse.com
ELK Stack
elastic.coSide by side
| Figure | ClickStack | ELK Stack |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $53/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 6 | 12 |
| Spec score · Log Management Software | 9.3 (#4) | 9.5 (#1) |
| Deployment options | both | Elastic Stack is available as hosted Elastic Cloud service or self-managed software for on-premises, public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid environments. |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations | Documented partners include Bindplane, bitdrift, Odigos and Telflo for collector management, mobile telemetry, eBPF tracing and routing control. | Elastic offers over 300 turn-key integrations for Search, Security, Observability, and cloud providers including AWS, Azure, and GCP. |
| Log pipelines | No | Yes |
| Purpose | ClickStack is an open-source observability stack for OpenTelemetry that unifies logs, metrics, traces, session replays, and errors. | The Elastic Stack combines Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash to take data from any source and format for search, analysis, and visualization. |
| Structured log parsing | Yes | Yes |
Plans
ClickStack
- ClickStack Open SourceFree
- ClickStack Open SourceFree
- Managed ClickStack trialFree
- Basic$53 a month
- Scale$437 a month
- Enterprise$571 a month
ELK Stack
- BasicPrice not published
- Logs EssentialsPriced on request
- Complete$0.09 a month
- Standard$99 a month
- Gold$114 a month
- Platinum$131 a month
- Enterprise$184 a month
- Basic (self-managed)Free
- Elastic Cloud hostedPriced on request
- Elastic Cloud ServerlessPriced on request
In their own words
ClickStack
ClickStack is an open-source observability stack for OpenTelemetry that brings logs, metrics, traces, session replays, and errors into one system. Its HyperDX interface provides Lucene-style search, SQL access, dashboards, alerts, event deltas, and event patterns. A bundled OpenTelemetry Collector handles native collection, while non-OTel wide event data can be used when it has a timestamp field. ClickStack stores data in ClickHouse and is designed for high-cardinality telemetry, with the product site describing sub-second queries even on petabytes of data. It supports self-hosted, hybrid, and cloud deployment. Managed ClickStack runs on ClickHouse Cloud with operations, scaling, upgrades, backups, reliability, authentication, and user management included. The managed offer advertises indefinite retention and storage below one cent per GB. An MCP server connects observability workflows with coding tools, collaboration services, runbooks, and custom agents.
ELK Stack
The Elastic Stack combines Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats and Logstash to bring data from different sources into search, analysis and visualization workflows. Elasticsearch is a distributed, JSON-based search and analytics engine, while Kibana provides dashboards, visualizations, live presentations and deployment management. Elastic Agent, Beats and a web crawler can ingest information from applications, infrastructure and public content. Features include alerting, machine learning, vector search, graph analytics, clustering, high availability and data lifecycle management. Elastic positions the platform for Search, Observability and Security, including centralized logging, monitoring and security analytics. It is available as hosted Elastic Cloud or as self-managed software for on-premises, public cloud, private cloud and hybrid environments. Elasticsearch and Kibana have an open source foundation, and Elasticsearch can be downloaded and started free. Elastic Cloud offers a 14-day trial without a credit card. Hosted pricing depends on deployment components and can include snapshot storage and data transfer charges; listed hosted tiers start at $99 a month.