Software company best known for the Elasticsearch search and analytics engine. Also produces Kibana, Logstash, and Beats (the Elastic Stack/ELK Stack). Publicly traded on NYSE.
In September 2024, Elastic added the OSI-approved AGPLv3 license as an option alongside SSPL and Elastic License for Elasticsearch and Kibana, effectively returning to open-source licensing. However, developers who had migrated to alternatives after the 2021 license change largely did not return, with community trust having been damaged by the original switch.
In January 2021, Elastic changed Elasticsearch and Kibana from the Apache 2.0 open-source license to a dual SSPL/Elastic License v2, motivated by dissatisfaction with AWS offering a competing managed service. The change prompted AWS to create the OpenSearch fork. Many developers migrated away, and the community felt betrayed by a bait-and-switch after building on what they believed was truly open-source software.