Learn about one of the Best Elastic Cloud Alternatives
Looking for a hosted Elastic Stack for logs and monitoring?
Sematext Cloud is a cost-efficient Elastic Cloud alternative. We provide hassle-free, managed Elastic Stack so you don’t need to maintain and scale it, in the Cloud or On-Premises.
Here’s what Sematext offers as an Elastic Cloud alternative:
A Completely Managed Elasticsearch: No ELK Setup & Maintenance
Although Elastic Cloud provides a UI on top of Elasticsearch, it is still down to you, the user, to perform many Elasticsearch management tasks. Apart from taking up a lot of time, this requires a certain level of Elastic Stack expertise that many companies normally don’t have.
Sematext Cloud, on the other hand, is a completely managed service specifically built for monitoring, logging, and other time-series use cases. All of the work under the hood is completely taken care of by our team of Elasticsearch experts which means that your team can focus on using our Elastic Stack rather than setting up and maintaining your Elastic Cloud clusters, ingestion pipelines, etc.
No Contracts and Flexible Accounts
With Sematext Cloud there are no contracts or commitments and you can cancel any time. Pricing for logs is metered and based only on 3 factors: plan, daily volume, and data retention. We charge at the end of the month and you only pay for what you have used.
Controlled User Roles & Spending
Moreover, unlike Elastic Cloud which is licensed at an account level, each Sematext Cloud user can have one or more Apps (think of Apps as spaces that hold your different groups or types of data) and each App can have a different plan. This means that plans for critical and non-critical data can be selected accordingly and this enables you to control your spending at a very fine level.
Public Costs vs. Elastic Cloud’s Hidden Enterprise Pricing
Sematext Cloud pricing is completely transparent and public so there are no surprises during the evaluation process. Elastic Cloud only shares ‘Standard’ pricing publicly. However, our customers tell us that we compare very favorably across all plans. We also do not charge extra for customers who choose to use the EU AWS data center location and redundancy across multiple AWS Availability Zones as this is built into all our plans and doesn’t increase your costs. This is not the case with Elastic Cloud.
For example, a person looking to ship 75 GB of logs per day to Sematext Cloud, using the top Pro Pro plan with full functionality, redundancy and 30 days of data retention would pay $5,995/month. For the same functionality in Elastic Cloud, bearing in mind ingestion spikes and the additional disk space often required for Elasticsearch, we estimate that a customer would need to allocate 5 TB of storage + high availability.
Note that this is a very conservative estimate. 75 GB/day * 30 days with redundancy requires 4.5 TB of storage, but this doesn’t take into account the subtle technical details, such as Elasticsearch actually needing more storage when the data is not only stored but also indexed (which it almost always is because you can’t search data that is not indexed), plus extra storage when the underlying index segments are optimized. But even with this conservative estimate, the Elastic Cloud cost is $8,377.63/month for Elastic Cloud customers in Europe. The difference in costs would be similar for non-European deployments.
Here’s the pricing breakdown, so you can see where $8,377.63/month comes from:
| Elastic Cloud Architecture | Hot-Warm Architecture
|
|---|---|
| ES data memory | 57 GB |
| ES data storage | 4.75 TB |
| Total memory | 306 GB |
| Total storage | 5.23 TB |
| Monthly rate | $8,377.63 |
Elastic Cloud Storage Can Be Slow But Not With Sematext Cloud
Technical side-note: You see that aws.data.highstorage.d2 instance type? It’s got a nice & big storage, but it's slooooow. How do we know this? Because we tried using it in Sematext Cloud, too, but it was too slow.
Also, please note that if you want to run more than 5 Elasticsearch data nodes in Elastic Cloud you need to speak with the sales.
Hassle-Free Scalability
Planning Elasticsearch clusters in Elastic Cloud is nice when your data volume remains static. In the real world, we face the challenge that data volume is continuously growing. With Elastic Cloud, you have to upscale your cluster manually. To avoid doing this too often you typically allocate more resources than you need, which leads to higher costs. In Sematext Cloud, you simply adjust the retention time or ship more data. The plan for each App (“virtual index”) can be adjusted for daily volume or retention time whenever you wish.
Pay What You Use vs. Spending On Unused Resources
Another case where Sematext Cloud flexibility shines is a temporary decrease in the daily data volume - you only pay for what you use. In Elastic Cloud, you would keep your oversized cluster running because downscaling can get problematic. The minimum cluster size must keep the existing data and deal with potential growth as well.
Do yourself a favor and offload all scalability and management work to Sematext instead of spending money on unused resources or having the responsibility of adjusting the cluster size continuously.
Flexible and Lightweight Log Shipping
Sematext Cloud works with all standard logging facilities and agents. This includes Beats, Fluentd, Logstash, Syslog, rsyslog and NxLog (Windows), log4j2, and many other log shippers. Elastic Cloud, on the other hand, encourages users to implement Logstash and Beats for log shipping. Sematext has also built its own open-source log shipper, Logagent, with a lower memory footprint and a lower CPU overhead than Logstash, but with Logstash-like plugins.
Multiple & Rich Data Visualization Options
As well as offering full integration with Kibana, Sematext customers also have the option to inspect logs via our own Sematext UI and even access their data via the secure Elasticsearch API.
Full Stack Observability
Get Actionable Insights Faster With Sematext Cloud
Sematext Cloud allows you to jump from alerts to metrics, to root cause log analysis all in one unified platform. This not only makes life easier but also saves on the cost of licensing for multiple tools. Try it for free today!
Additionally, Sematext is introducing Transaction Tracing! Get your early invite to Transaction Tracing today!