What Elastic Enterprise Search can do for you

Elastic Enterprise Search pricing offers a managed Search as a Service solution built on the Elasticsearch platform, extending the core functionalities with additional features and security. The vendor focuses on delivering streamlined configurations, ready-made user interfaces, and automatic scalability.  While Elasticsearch is open-source and requires advanced coding capabilities to deliver top-spec security and robustness, Elastic Enterprise Search offers a pre-built service leveraging Elastic’s flagship product. Available as part of the Elastic Stack (together with Logstash and Kibana), Elastic Enterprise Search pricing is typically contained within an Elastic Cloud subscription. Organizations may also self-deploy, although this can undo the user-friendly advantages of using Elastic Enterprise Search over Elasticsearch.   The vendor enables businesses to build personalized and scalable AI search experiences, either within the workplace or for public-facing platforms with flexible APIs. Elastic Enterprise Search pricing covers six primary search solutions:

• Generative AI
• Search applications
• Ecommerce
• Website
• Workplace search
• Customer support

Elastic pricing structures and tiers

Elastic Enterprise Search pricing is commercially available as part of an Elastic Cloud subscription alongside Logstash and Kibana (forming the complete ELK Stack). This provides comprehensive security, data analytics, indexing, log management, and search capabilities under one subscription. The ELK Stack (also known simply as the Elastic Stack) is split into three main components:

• Logstash – Data collection and restructuring.  

• Elasticsearch – The search engine underpinning the entire stack. Comes packaged as Elastic Enterprise Search for organizations seeking pre-built Search as a Service solutions.  
• Kibana – Visualizes search data via interactive dashboards, charts, graphs, and other tools to help you gain insights and identify data trends.

The vendor offers four subscription tiers, ranging from Standard to Enterprise. The Elastic Enterprise Search cost responds to several variables, but you can find a general overview of the pricing structure below:

Elastic Enterprise Search pricing – Standard Monthly cost from $95 (for full ELK Stack)

‍The Standard plan includes core Elastic Stack features but with limited functionality compared to higher tiers. It’s the recommended place to start your Elastic Enterprise Search pricing journey, helping you get to grips with the vendor for as little as $95 a month. Standard mainly targets individuals or small teams, lacking multi-stack functionality and advanced security features. That being said, users still benefit from hundreds of out-of-the-box integrations, cloud security posture management, cloud vulnerability management, and more.  

Elastic Enterprise Search pricing – Gold Monthly cost from $109 (for full ELK Stack)

‍Gold offers everything in Standard plus additional reporting, third-party alerting actions, watcher, and multi-stack monitoring. The other main advantage is a far better support system, with phone and web-based support and a target initial response time of four business hours for urgent queries. The search component doesn’t offer many new advantages compared to Standard, so consider this when solely looking for Elastic Enterprise Search pricing. Even still, Gold looks essential for small to medium-sized organizations – you may quickly run out of resources using the Standard plan outside of small teams.

Elastic Enterprise Search pricing – Platinum Monthly cost from $125 (for full ELK Stack)

‍The Platinum Elastic Cloud price plan offers advanced ELK Stack security features alongside advanced machine learning solutions for anomaly detection, supervised learning, and third-party model management. It notably provides behavioral ransomware protection, adding an extra layer of security for medium to large-sized organizations. Elastic Enterprise Search pricing at the Platinum level offers several benefits. These include semantic search using the Learned Sparse Encoder ML model, hybrid ranking with Reciprocal Rank Fusion, and native web crawler integrations. Users also get 24/7/365 support with an hour’s target initial response time for urgent problems. Elastic Enterprise Search pricing – Enterprise Monthly cost from $175 (for full ELK Stack)Enterprise is the most comprehensive Elastic pricing tier, designed for large-scale deployment with maximum resource customization and scalability. Searchable snapshots availability for everything from logging, metrics, APM data, and historical workplace records is the most attractive upgrade from the Platinum plan. The Elastic Enterprise Search pricing at this tier is $50 more than Platinum, but not without reason. Other key benefits include an Elastic Maps Server, Universal Profiling, and an Elastic AI Assistant for help with generative AI.

Additional Elastic Enterprise Search costs to consider‍

The above Elastic Enterprise Search pricing tiers are only rough indications of how much you will pay for a subscription. The vendor provides an Elastic pricing calculator to help businesses hone the potential price depending on several factors:

• Cloud provider
• Region
• Hardware profile
• Data tiers (warm, cold, frozen)
• Master instances
• Machine learning instances
• Kibana instances
• Integrations Server instances
• Enterprise Search instances

Use the calculator linked above as an initial indicator, but don’t forget how negotiation tactics can ultimately help you access a better Elastic Enterprise Search price. As a whole, our data shows Elastic to have a 62/100 parity score, leaving medium room to score a discount. The Vertice platform collects first-hand customer data to infer what other users are paying for SaaS and cloud services. Our white glove procurement strategy leverages these pricing benchmarks to help you gain the best price.

Other vendors offering Search as a Service‍

Procuring a Search as a Service solution that suits your specific business needs without going overboard or offering too little can be tricky. Understand the difference between Elastic Enterprise Search pricing and other alternative SaaS vendors offering similar Search as a Service functionality below:

Elastic Enterprise Search pricing vs AmazonOpen Search Service

The Amazon OpenSearch Service is built on the same Elasticsearch foundation. The AWS-managed service offers similarly full-spectrum Search as a Service solutions, but lags behind Elastic Enterprise Search regarding new feature adoption rates. Amazon OpenSearch Service pricing is extremely flexible, typically calculated on a case-by-case basis depending on resource usage. Reserved Instance Plan examples start from $43.80 per month and hit a $148.19 maximum. The data suggests it will be more cost-effective than Elastic pricing overall, although this comes with notable downsides. Users have limited features compared to Elastic Platinum and Enterprise plans. Most importantly, you’ll be locked into the AWS cloud platform, resulting in far less versatility.

Elastic Enterprise Search pricing vs Yext

Yext pricing features four tiers:

• Emerging – $4 per week
• Essential – $9 per week
• Complete – $10 per week
• Premium – $19 per week

The vendor cannot match the same full-spectrum usability as the Elastic Stack and is primarily a customer-facing Search as a Service solution. It could be a great option for businesses looking for an Elastic Enterprise Search price equivalent without the assorted add-ons like Kibana and Logstash.

Elastic Enterprise Search pricing vs Algolia

Algolia pricing is usually on a pay-as-you-go basis and also has a free tier. The vendor is perfect for businesses seeking a user-friendly, cost-effective search solution focussing on scalability and core search functionalities, particularly within the ecommerce sector. Algolia cannot offer anywhere near the same comprehensive search and data analytics solutions as the full Elastic Stack, but can be a useful substitute for certain elements within Elastic Enterprise Search.

Elastic pricing – the Vertice verdict‍

Elastic Enterprise Search is the bedrock of the ELK Stack, providing extensive and industry-leading Search as a Service solutions for the workplace and customer-facing platforms. This Swiss army knife leverages Elasticsearch architecture better than competitors like Amazon OpenSearch Service, but at a typically higher price. Consider whether you need complete Elastic Cloud functionality before pressing ahead, as the Elastic Enterprise Search cost is contained within the entire stack. The Vertice platform can assist your Elastic Enterprise Search procurement by leveraging our insights into what other customers are paying and negotiating the most cost-effective plan. Our service also consolidates your SaaS and cloud stacks, helping to increase visibility, reduce spend, and manage risk.