Elastic Security vs OpenSearch

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.

OpenSearch is a free, community-driven, open-source suite for ingesting, searching, visualizing, and analyzing data. It includes a data store and search engine, OpenSearch Dashboards, and the Data Prepper server-side collector. Search functions include full-text and field queries, multi-index search, field boosting, score-based ranking, sorting, and aggregations. The project identifies search, observability, and security analytics as application areas, including log analysis, threat intelligence, and event correlation. Listed machine-learning and AI capabilities include vector search and anomaly detection. OpenSearch can be deployed on premises or in hybrid and multicloud environments. Its Apache License 2.0 permits use, modification, extension, embedding, monetization, and resale. It is compatible with Beats, Fluent Bit, and Fluentd for ingestion and processing. A read-only ODBC driver for Windows and macOS connects tools such as Tableau, Microsoft Excel, and Power BI to the SQL plugin. Dashboards provides visualizations and an interface for plugins including security, alerting, Index State Management, and SQL. The downloads page warns that minimal distributions lack security features and are intended for carefully controlled environments or embedding in another service.