Elastic Cloud Hosted vs Elastic Cloud Serverless

Elastic Cloud Hosted9.4Visit Elastic Cloud Serverless9.2Visit

Higher score Elastic Cloud Hosted #1 in Elasticsearch Hosting 9.4/10 14-day trial Free trial✓ 4 of 4 features Visit Elastic Cloud

vs

Elastic Cloud Serverless #2 in Elasticsearch Hosting 9.2/10 14-day trial Free trial✓ 4 of 4 features Visit Elastic

• Elastic Cloud Hosted fits best

  Teams wanting a mature full-stack managed service

• Elastic Cloud Serverless fits best

  Teams preferring serverless usage-based Elasticsearch

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Side by side

Feature	Elastic Cloud Hosted 9.4/10 Visit ↗	Elastic Cloud Serverless 9.2/10 Visit ↗
At a glance
Editor score	9.4	9.2
Ranking	#1 in Elasticsearch Hosting	#2 in Elasticsearch Hosting
Best for	Teams wanting a mature full-stack managed service	Teams preferring serverless usage-based Elasticsearch
Pricing model	Paid	Paid
Starting price	$99/mo	$0.05/GB/mo
Free plan	—	—
Free trial	14 days	14 days
Free trial length	14 days	14 days
Deployment	Cloud	Cloud
Platforms	Web	Web
Support	Phone, Tickets, Docs · 24/7	Email, Phone, Tickets, Community, Docs · 24/7
Compliance	SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, SSO/SAML, 2FA	SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, SSO/SAML
Built for	Small business, Mid-market, Enterprise	Small business, Mid-market, Enterprise
Features Elastic Cloud Hosted 4/4 · Elastic Cloud Serverless 4/4
Kibana included	✓	✓
Autoscaling	✓	✓
Managed backups	✓	✓
SSO support	✓	✓
Specs
Deployment model	Not checked yet	Serverless
Support level	24/7	24/7
Our review
Pros	Managed Elasticsearch and Kibana with autoscaling and scheduled snapshots Vector and semantic search plus observability and security applications AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and hundreds of integration options	Automatic scaling, upgrades, backups, and business continuity management Kibana included with search, analytics, logging, and security workflows Separate metering for ingest, search, ML, storage, and egress
Cons	No free plan; paid access starts at $99 per month Pricing varies with instance type and actual usage 24/7/365 support and SAML SSO require higher-tier plans	No free plan, with a 14-day free trial instead Consumption-based billing can require close usage monitoring Availability is limited to selected AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud regions
Our verdict	Elastic Cloud Hosted is Elastic’s managed cloud service for running Elasticsearch and Kibana on AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. It is suited to teams building search, vector retrieval, observability, security analytics, or data… Read the review →	Elastic Cloud Serverless provides fully managed serverless Elasticsearch projects for search, analytics, vector workloads, logging, and security use cases. It is aimed at teams that want Elasticsearch and Kibana without provisioning or… Read the review →

Strengths and trade-offs

• Elastic Cloud Hosted — where it wins

  • Managed Elasticsearch and Kibana with autoscaling and scheduled snapshots
  • Vector and semantic search plus observability and security applications
  • AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and hundreds of integration options

  Where it doesn't

  • No free plan; paid access starts at $99 per month
  • Pricing varies with instance type and actual usage
  • 24/7/365 support and SAML SSO require higher-tier plans

• Elastic Cloud Serverless — where it wins

  • Automatic scaling, upgrades, backups, and business continuity management
  • Kibana included with search, analytics, logging, and security workflows
  • Separate metering for ingest, search, ML, storage, and egress

  Where it doesn't

  • No free plan, with a 14-day free trial instead
  • Consumption-based billing can require close usage monitoring
  • Availability is limited to selected AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud regions

• Elastic Cloud Hosted9.4/10 · 14-day trial

  A mature managed search stack with autoscaling, Kibana, and tiered support.

  Visit Elastic CloudFull verdict →
• Elastic Cloud Serverless9.2/10 · 14-day trial

  A serverless Elasticsearch service for teams that want managed operations and usage-based billing.

  Visit ElasticFull verdict →