# Elastic (ELK Stack) vs Papertrail

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

| Attribute | Elastic (ELK Stack) | Papertrail |
|---|---|---|
| **vioscaleAI score** | 64.4 (65% (medium)) | 56.8 (47% (low)) |
| activity.commits_last_30d | 100 | - |
| adoption.dependent_repos | 18,551 | - |
| adoption.github_stars | 78,270 | - |
| 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":"Cloud-based log aggregation service that collects logs from multiple sources and systems, providing centralized visibility with search, alerting, live-tailing, and archival capabilities. Designed for developers and operations teams to troubleshoot issues and maintain system uptime without complexity. It is indexed under Log Management Software.","source":"https://www.papertrail.com","question":"What is Papertrail?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Papertrail offers a free tier, so you can start without paying. Paid plans start at $82 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.papertrail.com/blog/more-consistent-service-intervals-and-pricing/","question":"Is Papertrail free?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have confirmed browser-based access to Papertrail. That is the extent of what we could verify from public sources, so it may well offer desktop or mobile clients we have not indexed.","source":"https://www.papertrail.com","question":"What platforms does Papertrail support?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have only confirmed a cloud / SaaS deployment for Papertrail, so it appears to be vendor-hosted. If a self-hosted option exists we have not found it documented publicly.","source":"https://www.papertrail.com","question":"Can Papertrail be self-hosted?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have confirmed 16 integrations for Papertrail, including Zapier, Teams, PagerDuty, Google Sheets, Kubernetes, DigitalOcean, AppOptics and Snap Agent, plus 8 more. This is what we could verify from public sources, so the vendor may support others we have not indexed.","source":"https://www.papertrail.com/blog/more-consistent-service-intervals-and-pricing/","question":"What does Papertrail integrate with?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have independently confirmed GDPR for Papertrail. Certifications we do not list are ones we have not been able to verify from public sources, which is not the same as Papertrail not holding them. Always confirm compliance directly before you rely on it.","source":"https://www.papertrail.com/security","question":"What security certifications does Papertrail have?","confidence":0.7},{"answer":"Papertrail is available worldwide. Its primary market is the United States.","source":"https://www.papertrail.com/blog/more-consistent-service-intervals-and-pricing/","question":"Where is Papertrail available?","confidence":0.5}]` |
| deployment.options | `{"cloud":true,"self_hosted":true}` | `{"cloud":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. | Cloud-based log aggregation service that collects logs from multiple sources and systems, providing centralized visibility with search, alerting, live-tailing, and archival capabilities. Designed for developers and operations teams to troubleshoot issues and maintain system uptime without complexity. |
| 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":"cloud","alerting":true,"log_role":"platform","live_tail":true,"dashboards":false,"otel_support":"none","pii_redaction":true,"query_language":"proprietary search + SQL (Hive for archives)","full_text_search":true,"retention_tiering":true,"structured_parsing":true,"object_store_backed":true}` |
| integrations.count | 6 | 15 |
| 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":"Zapier"},{"name":"Teams"},{"name":"PagerDuty"},{"name":"Google Sheets"},{"name":"Kubernetes"},{"name":"DigitalOcean"},{"name":"AppOptics"},{"name":"Snap Agent"},{"name":"S3"},{"name":"Hadoop"},{"name":"Hive"},{"name":"HTTP webhooks"},{"name":"Email"},{"name":"remote_syslog2"},{"name":"Unix/BSD system logs"},{"name":"Windows"}]` |
| language.primary | Java | - |
| market.availability | `{"hqCountry":"US","primaryMarkets":["US","GB"],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` | `{"primaryMarkets":["US"],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` |
| platform.support | `{"cli":true,"web":true}` | `{"web":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":"subscription","plans":[{"free":false,"name":"16 GB/month - 1 day retention","summary":"$82/month","commitment":"monthly","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":82,"period":"month","currency":"USD"}],"contactSales":false,"includedLimits":{"data_transfer":"16GB/month"}},{"free":false,"name":"16 GB/month - 3 days retention","summary":"$103/month","commitment":"monthly","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":103,"period":"month","currency":"USD"}],"contactSales":false,"includedLimits":{"data_transfer":"16GB/month"}},{"free":false,"name":"16 GB/month - 7 days retention","summary":"$125/month","commitment":"monthly","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":125,"period":"month","currency":"USD"}],"contactSales":false,"includedLimits":{"data_transfer":"16GB/month"}},{"free":false,"name":"16 GB/month - 14 days retention","summary":"$150/month","commitment":"monthly","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":150,"period":"month","currency":"USD"}],"contactSales":false,"includedLimits":{"data_transfer":"16GB/month"}},{"free":false,"name":"16 GB/month - 30 days retention","summary":"$195/month","commitment":"monthly","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":195,"period":"month","currency":"USD"}],"contactSales":false,"includedLimits":{"data_transfer":"16GB/month"}}],"summary":"From $82/month. Free tier and 30-day free trial available. Also offers 8 GB, 25 GB, and 50 GB monthly plans with variable pricing.","currency":"USD","freeTier":true,"sourceUrl":"https://www.papertrail.com/blog/more-consistent-service-intervals-and-pricing/","retrievedAt":"2026-08-14T08:33:53.559Z","freeTrialDays":30,"startingPrice":{"amount":82,"period":"month","currency":"USD"},"billingPeriods":["month"]}` |
| pricing.free_tier | yes | yes |
| pricing.model | commercial | freemium |
| pricing.price_level | high | high |
| pricing.transparent | yes | yes |
| 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"}]` | - |
| reliability.sla_pct | 99.95 | - |
| reliability.status_page | yes | yes |
| security.disclosure_policy | yes | - |
| security.gdpr | yes | yes |
| security.iso27001 | yes | - |
| security.scorecard | 5.6 | - |
| 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"}` | - |

## Capabilities (Log Management Software)

| Capability | Elastic (ELK Stack) | Papertrail |
|---|:--:|:--:|
| **Core** |  |  |
| Pipeline role | End-to-end platform | End-to-end platform |
| **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 | - | None |
| Query language | ES|QL (with native PromQL support) | proprietary search + SQL (Hive for archives) |
| **Deployment** |  |  |
| Hosting | Cloud + self-hosted | Cloud only |

*Source: vioscaleAI. Generated 2026-10-16T03:13:37.893Z. "-" = undocumented, not absent.*