# Elastic (ELK Stack) vs Fluent Bit

**Leader by vioscaleAI score:** Elastic (ELK Stack)

| Attribute | Elastic (ELK Stack) | Fluent Bit |
|---|---|---|
| **vioscaleAI score** | 64.4 (65% (medium)) | 51.1 (54% (medium)) |
| activity.commits_last_30d | 100 | 100 |
| adoption.dependent_repos | 18,551 | 1 |
| adoption.github_stars | 78,270 | 8,155 |
| content.faq | `[{"answer":"A cloud-based observability and search platform that ingests logs from multiple sources, automatically structures them with AI, and enables full-text search, alerting, dashboards, and machine learning analysis on unstructured data. It is indexed under Log Management Software.","source":"https://www.elastic.co/pricing/cloud-hosted","question":"What is Elastic (ELK Stack)?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Elastic (ELK Stack) offers a free tier, so you can start without paying. Paid plans start at $99 per month. Prices are published openly on the vendor's own pricing page. Pricing changes often, so verify at source before relying on it.","source":"https://www.elastic.co/pricing/cloud-hosted","question":"Is Elastic (ELK Stack) free?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Elastic (ELK Stack) supports the web and a command-line interface. Platforms we have not confirmed are simply not listed here rather than ruled out.","source":"https://www.elastic.co/pricing/cloud-hosted","question":"What platforms does Elastic (ELK Stack) support?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Yes. Elastic (ELK Stack) can be deployed cloud / SaaS, hybrid and self-hosted, so it does not have to run on the vendor's infrastructure.","source":"https://www.elastic.co/pricing/cloud-hosted","question":"Can Elastic (ELK Stack) be self-hosted?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have confirmed 31 integrations for Elastic (ELK Stack), including OpenAI, Anthropic, Jina AI, Amazon Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, Microsoft Azure AI, Mistral and Cohere, plus 23 more. This is what we could verify from public sources, so the vendor may support others we have not indexed.","source":"https://www.elastic.co/pricing/cloud-hosted","question":"What does Elastic (ELK Stack) integrate with?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have independently confirmed ISO 27001 and GDPR for Elastic (ELK Stack). Certifications we do not list are ones we have not been able to verify from public sources, which is not the same as Elastic (ELK Stack) not holding them. Always confirm compliance directly before you rely on it.","source":"https://www.elastic.co/trust/faq","question":"What security certifications does Elastic (ELK Stack) have?","confidence":0.7},{"answer":"Elastic (ELK Stack) is available worldwide. Its primary markets are the United States and the United Kingdom. The vendor is headquartered in the United States.","source":"https://www.elastic.co/pricing/cloud-hosted","question":"Where is Elastic (ELK Stack) available?","confidence":0.75}]` | `[{"answer":"Collects and routes telemetry data from distributed systems with high efficiency and built-in support for the OpenTelemetry standard. It is indexed under Log Management Software.","source":"https://fluentbit.io/","question":"What is Fluent Bit?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Fluent Bit is open source, so it can be self-hosted and used at no licence cost. It is released under the Apache-2.0 licence. Pricing changes often, so verify at source before relying on it.","source":"https://fluentbit.io/","question":"Is Fluent Bit free to use?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Fluent Bit supports Windows, macOS, Linux and a command-line interface. Platforms we have not confirmed are simply not listed here rather than ruled out.","source":"https://fluentbit.io/","question":"What platforms does Fluent Bit support?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Yes. Fluent Bit can be deployed cloud / SaaS, hybrid, on-premise and self-hosted, so it does not have to run on the vendor's infrastructure.","source":"https://fluentbit.io/","question":"Can Fluent Bit be self-hosted?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have confirmed 12 integrations for Fluent Bit, including AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, Syslog, Prometheus, Windows Event Log and Podman, plus 4 more. This is what we could verify from public sources, so the vendor may support others we have not indexed.","source":"https://fluentbit.io/","question":"What does Fluent Bit integrate with?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Yes. Fluent Bit is published under the Apache-2.0 licence, a permissive licence that generally allows commercial use and modification. Licence terms can change between releases, so verify against the repository for the version you intend to use.","source":"https://github.com/fluent/fluent-bit","question":"Is Fluent Bit open source?","confidence":0.95}]` |
| deployment.options | `{"cloud":true,"self_hosted":true}` | `{"cloud":true,"hybrid":true,"on_prem":true,"self_hosted":true}` |
| description.long | Open-source system for collecting logs and application data, indexing them for searchability, and providing interactive dashboards for analysis. Supports both cloud-hosted and self-managed deployments. | A fast, lightweight data pipeline tool that processes and forwards logs, metrics, and traces with native OpenTelemetry support, optimized for cloud and containerized deployments. |
| features.capabilities | `{"hosting":"both","alerting":true,"log_role":"platform","live_tail":true,"dashboards":true,"query_language":"ES|QL (with native PromQL support)","full_text_search":true,"retention_tiering":true,"structured_parsing":true,"object_store_backed":false}` | `{"hosting":"both","log_role":"shipper","otel_support":"native","query_language":"SQL","structured_parsing":true}` |
| integrations.count | 6 | 70 |
| integrations.list | `[{"name":"OpenAI"},{"name":"Anthropic"},{"name":"Jina AI"},{"name":"Amazon Bedrock"},{"name":"Google Vertex AI"},{"name":"Microsoft Azure AI"},{"name":"Mistral"},{"name":"Cohere"},{"name":"Hugging Face"},{"name":"NVIDIA"},{"name":"IBM watsonx"},{"name":"LlamaIndex"},{"name":"LangChain"},{"name":"Vectorize.io"},{"name":"Slack"},{"name":"Jira"},{"name":"PagerDuty"},{"name":"ServiceNow"},{"name":"Microsoft Teams"},{"name":"xMatters"},{"name":"IBM Resilient"},{"name":"Filebeat"},{"name":"Metricbeat"},{"name":"Heartbeat"},{"name":"Elastic Agent"},{"name":"Logstash"},{"name":"Osquery"},{"name":"AWS S3"},{"name":"Red Hat"},{"name":"Unstructured.io"},{"name":"Aryn"},{"name":"Alibaba Cloud"}]` | `[{"name":"AWS S3"},{"name":"Google Cloud Storage"},{"name":"Kubernetes"},{"name":"OpenTelemetry"},{"name":"Syslog"},{"name":"Prometheus"},{"name":"Windows Event Log"},{"name":"Podman"},{"name":"NVIDIA GPU"},{"name":"HTTP"},{"name":"Google Chronicle"},{"name":"Fluent Forward"},{"name":"AWS CloudWatch Logs","native":true,"direction":"outbound"},{"name":"Slack","native":true},{"name":"Elasticsearch","native":true,"direction":"outbound"},{"name":"ArvanCloud CloudLogs","native":true,"direction":"outbound"}]` |
| language.primary | Java | C |
| license.spdx | - | Apache-2.0 |
| market.availability | `{"hqCountry":"US","primaryMarkets":["US","GB"],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` | - |
| platform.support | `{"cli":true,"web":true}` | `{"cli":true,"mac":true,"linux":true,"windows":true}` |
| pricing | `{"type":"subscription","plans":[{"free":false,"name":"Standard","summary":"From $99/month. Free 14-day trial.","features":["Distributed Elasticsearch Platform on AWS, Azure, GCP","Elasticsearch Query Language (ES|QL)","AutoOps monitoring","Hundreds of out-of-the-box integrations","Discover, dashboards, alerting","Security: detection engine, centralized agent management","Observability: APM, logging, metrics apps","Synthetic monitoring","Limited web support (2 contacts, 3-business day response)"],"commitment":"monthly","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":99,"period":"month","currency":"USD"}],"description":"Foundation plan with Elasticsearch datastore, integrations, monitoring, security basics, and observability.","contactSales":false},{"free":false,"name":"Gold","summary":"From $114/month. Includes reporting and third-party integrations.","features":["Everything in Standard","Reporting","Third-party alerting actions","Watcher","Enterprise Search","Advanced workflows","Base support (business hours, phone/web, 6 contacts)"],"commitment":"monthly","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":114,"period":"month","currency":"USD"}],"description":"Standard plan plus reporting, advanced alerting, third-party actions, enterprise search, and business hours support.","contactSales":false},{"free":false,"name":"Platinum","summary":"From $131/month. ML and advanced security included.","features":["Everything in Gold","Advanced security features","Machine learning: anomaly detection, supervised learning","Cross-cluster replication","Semantic and vector search with ML models (ELSER, e5)","AI-assisted pipelines with Streams","Log categorization, service maps","Service Level Objectives","24/7/365 support (1-hour urgent response, 8 contacts)","99.95% monthly uptime SLA"],"commitment":"monthly","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":131,"period":"month","currency":"USD"}],"description":"Gold plan plus advanced security, machine learning, cross-cluster replication, and 24/7 support with 1-hour urgent response.","contactSales":false},{"free":false,"name":"Enterprise","summary":"From $184/month. Full AI suite and advanced automation.","features":["Everything in Platinum","Searchable snapshots in cold/frozen tiers","Elastic Maps Server","Cross-cluster search and ES|QL Data Federation","GPU inference with Elastic Inference Service","Elastic Agent Builder powered by LLM","AI-assisted dashboard creation","Elastic Workflows (automation)","SAML SSO","Inference Service management","Hybrid search and RAG","Semantic reranking","Attack Discovery (agentic investigation)","Premium support (30-minute urgent response, 8 contacts)","99.95% monthly uptime SLA"],"commitment":"monthly","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":184,"period":"month","currency":"USD"}],"description":"Platinum plan plus advanced AI features, searchable snapshots, GPU inference, workflow automation, SAML SSO, and premium 30-minute support.","contactSales":false}],"addOns":[{"name":"Synthetic Monitoring","components":[{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"test_run"},"kind":"metered","amount":0.0123,"currency":"USD"},{"kind":"fixed","amount":28,"period":"month","currency":"USD"}]}],"summary":"From $99/month. Subscription model with free 14-day trial. Usage-based pricing for cloud resources (120 GB storage / 2 zones baseline).","currency":"USD","freeTier":true,"sourceUrl":"https://www.elastic.co/pricing/cloud-hosted","retrievedAt":"2026-08-14T11:07:35.066Z","freeTrialDays":14,"startingPrice":{"amount":99,"period":"month","currency":"USD"},"billingPeriods":["month"]}` | `{"type":"open_source","sourceUrl":"https://fluentbit.io/","retrievedAt":"2026-09-14T13:26:57.718Z"}` |
| pricing.free_tier | yes | yes |
| pricing.model | commercial | commercial |
| pricing.price_level | high | free |
| pricing.transparent | yes | - |
| release.cadence_days | - | 8 |
| release.history | `[{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.5.5","date":"2026-10-06T14:01:58Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.5.5"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.4.8","date":"2026-10-06T14:01:31Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.4.8"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v8.19.23","date":"2026-10-06T14:01:58Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.19.23"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v8.19.22","date":"2026-09-23T15:20:20Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.19.22"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.5.4","date":"2026-09-15T18:19:18Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.5.4"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.4.7","date":"2026-09-15T18:19:34Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.4.7"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.5.3","date":"2026-09-03T10:08:41Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.5.3"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.4.6","date":"2026-09-01T12:51:12Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.4.6"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v8.19.21","date":"2026-09-01T12:53:43Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.19.21"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.5.2","date":"2026-08-20T16:44:04Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.5.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.5.1","date":"2026-08-11T17:58:01Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.5.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.4.5","date":"2026-08-11T17:57:54Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.4.5"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v8.19.20","date":"2026-08-11T18:24:43Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.19.20"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.5.0","date":"2026-08-04T11:46:37Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.5.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.4.4","date":"2026-07-21T12:56:20Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.4.4"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.3.8","date":"2026-07-21T12:56:46Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.3.8"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v8.19.19","date":"2026-07-21T13:28:17Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.19.19"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v8.19.18","date":"2026-06-30T16:43:41Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.19.18"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.3.7","date":"2026-06-30T16:47:02Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.3.7"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.4.3","date":"2026-06-30T14:30:13Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.4.3"}]` | `[{"url":"https://github.com/fluent/fluent-bit/releases/tag/v5.0.11","date":"2026-10-09T15:54:41Z","type":"stable","version":"v5.0.11"},{"url":"https://github.com/fluent/fluent-bit/releases/tag/v5.1.3","date":"2026-10-01T05:43:03Z","type":"stable","version":"v5.1.3"},{"url":"https://github.com/fluent/fluent-bit/releases/tag/v5.1.2","date":"2026-09-05T03:54:50Z","type":"stable","version":"v5.1.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/fluent/fluent-bit/releases/tag/v5.0.10","date":"2026-09-04T03:46:41Z","type":"stable","version":"v5.0.10"},{"url":"https://github.com/fluent/fluent-bit/releases/tag/v5.1.1","date":"2026-08-16T04:40:56Z","type":"stable","version":"v5.1.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/fluent/fluent-bit/releases/tag/v5.1.0","date":"2026-08-06T02:29:07Z","type":"stable","version":"v5.1.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/fluent/fluent-bit/releases/tag/v4.2.8","date":"2026-08-04T05:56:56Z","type":"stable","version":"v4.2.8"},{"url":"https://github.com/fluent/fluent-bit/releases/tag/v4.2.7","date":"2026-07-09T08:29:44Z","type":"stable","version":"v4.2.7"},{"url":"https://github.com/fluent/fluent-bit/releases/tag/v5.0.9","date":"2026-07-04T16:00:11Z","type":"stable","version":"v5.0.9"},{"url":"https://github.com/fluent/fluent-bit/releases/tag/v4.2.6","date":"2026-06-26T05:43:32Z","type":"stable","version":"v4.2.6"},{"url":"https://github.com/fluent/fluent-bit/releases/tag/v5.0.8","date":"2026-06-24T15:05:57Z","type":"stable","version":"v5.0.8"},{"url":"https://github.com/fluent/fluent-bit/releases/tag/v5.0.7","date":"2026-06-06T04:22:23Z","type":"stable","version":"v5.0.7"},{"url":"https://github.com/fluent/fluent-bit/releases/tag/v4.2.5","date":"2026-06-03T06:04:25Z","type":"stable","version":"v4.2.5"},{"url":"https://github.com/fluent/fluent-bit/releases/tag/v5.0.6","date":"2026-05-21T23:19:01Z","type":"stable","version":"v5.0.6"},{"url":"https://github.com/fluent/fluent-bit/releases/tag/v5.0.5","date":"2026-05-07T19:53:24Z","type":"stable","version":"v5.0.5"},{"url":"https://github.com/fluent/fluent-bit/releases/tag/v5.0.4","date":"2026-05-01T18:06:29Z","type":"stable","version":"v5.0.4"},{"url":"https://github.com/fluent/fluent-bit/releases/tag/v5.0.3","date":"2026-04-14T21:13:53Z","type":"stable","version":"v5.0.3"},{"url":"https://github.com/fluent/fluent-bit/releases/tag/v4.2.4","date":"2026-04-10T07:57:40Z","type":"stable","version":"v4.2.4"},{"url":"https://github.com/fluent/fluent-bit/releases/tag/v5.0.2","date":"2026-04-01T18:54:40Z","type":"stable","version":"v5.0.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/fluent/fluent-bit/releases/tag/v5.0.1","date":"2026-03-31T03:52:57Z","type":"stable","version":"v5.0.1"}]` |
| reliability.sla_pct | 99.95 | - |
| reliability.status_page | yes | - |
| security.disclosure_policy | yes | - |
| security.gdpr | yes | - |
| security.iso27001 | yes | - |
| security.scorecard | 5.6 | 5.7 |
| security.trust_center | https://www.elastic.co/legal/ethics-and-compliance | - |
| security.vulnerabilities | `{"count":45,"source":"https://advisories.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/advisories?ecosystem=maven&package_name=org.elasticsearch%3Aelasticsearch&per_page=100","last_12m":2,"max_severity":"HIGH"}` | `{"count":0,"source":"https://advisories.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/advisories?ecosystem=homebrew&package_name=fluent-bit&per_page=100","last_12m":0,"max_severity":null}` |

## Capabilities (Log Management Software)

| Capability | Elastic (ELK Stack) | Fluent Bit |
|---|:--:|:--:|
| **Core** |  |  |
| Pipeline role | End-to-end platform | Shipper |
| **Search** |  |  |
| Full-text log search | ✓ | - |
| Live tail / stream | ✓ | - |
| **Processing** |  |  |
| Structured parsing | ✓ | ✓ |
| PII redaction at ingest | - | - |
| **Ops** |  |  |
| Log-based alerting | ✓ | - |
| Dashboards / visualisation | ✓ | - |
| **Storage** |  |  |
| Retention tiering | ✓ | - |
| Object-store columnar backend | ✗ | - |
| **Interop** |  |  |
| OpenTelemetry logs | - | Native |
| Query language | ES|QL (with native PromQL support) | SQL |
| **Deployment** |  |  |
| Hosting | Cloud + self-hosted | Cloud + self-hosted |

*Source: vioscaleAI. Generated 2026-10-16T01:18:10.073Z. "-" = undocumented, not absent.*