# Elastic (ELK Stack) vs Papertrail

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

| Attribute | Elastic (ELK Stack) | Papertrail |
|---|---|---|
| **Vioscale score** | 68.4 (68% (medium)) | 58.1 (49% (low)) |
| activity.commits_last_30d | 100 | - |
| adoption.dependent_repos | 18,551 | - |
| adoption.github_stars | 77,862 | - |
| deployment.options | `{"cloud":true,"hybrid":true,"self_hosted":true}` | `{"cloud":true}` |
| description.long | 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. | 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":false,"query_language":"proprietary search + SQL (Hive for archives)","full_text_search":true,"retention_tiering":true,"structured_parsing":true,"object_store_backed":true}` |
| integrations.count | 35 | 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":"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}` | `{"cli":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/v9.5.2","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/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v8.19.17","date":"2026-06-23T13:59:04Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.19.17"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.3.6","date":"2026-06-23T14:09:56Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.3.6"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.4.2","date":"2026-05-28T14:59:44Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.4.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.3.5","date":"2026-05-28T14:59:30Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.3.5"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v8.19.16","date":"2026-05-28T14:59:08Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.19.16"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.4.1","date":"2026-05-12T18:02:29Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.4.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.4.0","date":"2026-05-05T15:15:40Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.4.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v8.19.15","date":"2026-04-30T15:24:27Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.19.15"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.3.4","date":"2026-04-30T15:24:33Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.3.4"}]` | - |
| reliability.sla_pct | 99.95 | - |
| reliability.status_page | yes | yes |
| security.disclosure_policy | yes | - |
| security.gdpr | yes | yes |
| security.iso27001 | yes | - |
| security.scorecard | 6.9 | - |
| 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: Vioscale. Generated 2026-09-01T16:48:14.604Z. "-" = undocumented, not absent.*