Elastic Agent
Elastic Agent: A free, flexible agent for teams managing telemetry through Elastic and Fleet. Ranked #3 of 28 in Telemetry Pipeline Software by our editors (9.1/10); pricing: Free plan; best for elastic-centered teams needing agent management.
At a glance
- Editor score9.1 / 10
- PricingFree plan
- Best forElastic-centered teams needing agent management
- Free planYes
- Paid fromFree
- Deployment modelBoth
- Founded2012 · Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Facts checked21 Sep 2026
Where it wins
- Free and open plan includes Fleet management and integrations
- Collects logs, metrics, traces, and security telemetry
- Supports more than 300 integrations and multiple outputs
Where it doesn't
- Advanced security and compliance require Platinum
- Enterprise features include advanced AI and orchestration
- Not open source and has no AI features in the agent
Our verdict on Elastic Agent
Elastic Agent is a unified host agent for collecting and forwarding logs, metrics, traces, availability data, and security telemetry into the Elastic Stack. It is aimed at teams that want centralized control through Fleet, with support for Windows, macOS, Linux, containers, and Kubernetes. Fleet provides web-based management for policies, integrations, upgrades, and agent status, while standalone deployment remains available for environments that do not use centralized management.
The published plans show a free and open tier that includes Elastic Agent, Fleet Server, the Fleet app, and Fleet integrations. Platinum adds advanced security and compliance, machine learning, and high availability. Enterprise adds searchable snapshots, advanced AI and orchestration, and cross-cluster search. Elastic Agent is distributed free with the Elastic License and included across Elastic subscription tiers, making the free tier a practical starting point while placing higher-level platform capabilities in paid subscriptions.
Its main strength is breadth within a telemetry pipeline. Elastic Agent can collect logs from files, containers, syslog, journald, Windows event logs, and remote services, along with host and service metrics and traces through OpenTelemetry integrations and embedded OTel Collector capabilities. Configurable processors can rename, add, drop, and conditionally transform event fields. Outputs include Elasticsearch, Kafka, and Logstash, with enrichment for Kubernetes and cloud metadata and integrations spanning AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, and more than 300 services. Choose it for Elastic-centered teams that need broad collection and Fleet-based administration. Teams seeking an open-source agent or built-in AI features should consider alternatives.
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Elastic Agent pricing
All 3 Elastic Agent plans and prices →
Elastic Agent fact sheet
| Free plan | Yes |
|---|---|
| Paid from | Free |
| Logs support | Yes |
| Metrics support | Yes |
| Traces support | Yes |
| Transform rules | Yes |
| Multi-destination routing | Yes |
| Data enrichment | Yes |
| Deployment model | Both |
| Deployment | Cloud, Self-hosted |
| Platforms | Windows, macOS, Linux |
| Support | Docs, Community |
| Built for | Small business, Mid-market, Enterprise (editorial estimate) |
| Integrations | 300+ integrations: Elasticsearch, Kafka, Logstash, OpenTelemetry, AWS, Azure … See all → |
| Pricing | Free plan (source) |
| Website | elastic.co |
| Facts checked | 21 Sep 2026 |
Elastic Agent integrations
Elastic Agent lists 300+ integrations on its own site — the 8 named here are the ones its pages call out.
- Elasticsearch
- Kafka
- Logstash
- OpenTelemetry
- AWS
- Azure
- Google Cloud
- Kubernetes
See all Elastic Agent integrations →
Alternatives to Elastic Agent
- Cribl StreamA broad routing and transformation layer for teams managing varied telemetry flows.9.4
- AWS Distro for OpenTelemetryA free, flexible telemetry pipeline for AWS-centric teams with downstream service costs.9.2
- BindplaneA managed OpenTelemetry pipeline with visual controls, broad integrations, and a free tier.9.0
See all Elastic Agent alternatives →
Elastic Agent vs the competition
- Elastic Agent vs Cribl Stream
- Elastic Agent vs AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry
- Elastic Agent vs Bindplane
- Elastic Agent vs Grafana Alloy
- Elastic Agent vs Tenzir
- Elastic Agent vs Datadog Observability Pipelines
Compare Elastic Agent with any tool side by side →
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The editor score above is our own research. What this page doesn't have yet is a reader's view — what you used Elastic Agent for, what worked and what didn't. No stars are seeded and no review is paid for; an editor reads every one before it appears.
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Reviewed by iTechGuides Editors · Editorial team · Updated Oct 2026
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