ELK Stack vs Logstash
ELK Stack
elastic.coLogstash
elastic.coSide by side
| Figure | ELK Stack | Logstash |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 12 | 1 |
| Spec score · Log Management Software | 9.5 (#1) | 8.5 (#25) |
| Archive export | Yes | Yes |
| Compliance | Elastic's Trust Center lists certifications and attestations including SOC 2 Type 2, SOC 3, PCI, HIPAA, ISO 27001, and FedRAMP Moderate and High. | Elastic's Trust Center lists certifications and standards including FedRAMP, PCI DSS, ISO/IEC 27001, SOC 2, and HIPAA. |
| Deployment | Elastic Stack is available as hosted Elastic Cloud service or self-managed software for on-premises, public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid environments. | self-hosted |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations | Elastic offers over 300 turn-key integrations for Search, Security, Observability, and cloud providers including AWS, Azure, and GCP. | Elastic describes turn-key integrations for connecting data sources and ingesting logs, metrics, traces, files, web content, and security events. |
| Live log tailing | Yes | Yes |
| Log pipelines | Yes | Yes |
| Purpose | The Elastic Stack combines Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash to take data from any source and format for search, analysis, and visualization. | Logstash is an open source server-side data processing pipeline that ingests data from multiple sources, transforms it, and sends it to a destination. |
| Security | Security capabilities include authentication integrations, role-based access control, SSL/TLS encryption, IP filtering, audit logging, and field- and document-level controls. | The product page says ingest pipelines can be secured and describes built-in security features for Pipeline Management UI controls. |
| Structured log parsing | Yes | Yes |
| Trial | Elastic advertises a free 14-day Elastic Cloud trial with no credit card required. | The download page offers a 14-day free trial for deploying Logstash hosted on Elastic Cloud Serverless, with no credit card required. |
Plans
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
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.
Logstash
Logstash is an open-source, server-side pipeline that collects data from many sources, transforms events, and sends results to destinations. It can continuously ingest logs, metrics, web application data, data-store information, and AWS service data. Filters parse events, identify fields, and transform content with features such as grok parsing, IP geolocation, and anonymizing or excluding sensitive fields. Data can go to multiple outputs, including Elasticsearch. Its plugin framework includes more than 200 input, filter, and output plugins, and custom plugins can be built with an API and generator. Persistent queues provide at-least-once delivery for in-flight events after node failures; dead letter queues retain events for inspection and replay. Monitoring tools show pipeline performance and availability. Logstash supports log pipelines, archive export, live tailing, and structured parsing. It is self-hosted, with Linux packages and Docker listed. The free plan is free under the Elastic License.