Scale your cluster, not your cost
Per production cluster
One license covers one production cluster — with as many nodes as you need.
Unlimited nodes
Grow from 3 nodes to 300. Your license cost never changes.
Dev & staging free
Development, staging, and QA systems are always included at no extra cost.
Try before you buy
Full feature set free for 60 days. No credit card, nothing to cancel.
That's the whole model. No node counting, no resource metering, no surprises at renewal.
Choose your edition
Search Guard Community Edition
- Free forever. Apache 2.0 licensed
- Essential security plus full alerting
- Unlimited nodes, unlimited clusters
Most popular
Search Guard Enterprise Edition
- SAML, OIDC, LDAP / Active Directory
- Document- and field-level security
- Audit logging and SLA support
Search Guard Compliance Edition
- Everything in Enterprise, plus:
- GDPR, HIPAA, SOX and ISO tooling
- Read-access tracking for sensitive data
We offer an
Academic & Scientific License
, as well as Custom Licenses
for your personal needs.Feature Breakdown
Every feature, every edition — in detail:
Included in every edition — Community too
- TLS encryption for REST and inter-node traffic — OpenSSL support, PEM and JKS
- Role-based access control on cluster, index, transport and HTTP level
- Internal user and group management
- HTTP Basic, PKI and proxy authentication
- Full Signals alerting: Elasticsearch and external data sources, escalation levels, throttling and acknowledgement
- Email, Slack and webhook alerting actions
- Kibana access and feature control
- Hot configuration reload — no cluster reboots
Works with Kibana, Logstash, Beats, cross-cluster search and replication, Elastic Stack Monitoring and Machine Learning — in every edition.
| Feature | Community Free forever · Apache 2.0 | Enterprise Most popular Per production cluster · unlimited nodes | Compliance Everything in Enterprise, plus audit-grade compliance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enterprise authentication & SSO | |||
| LDAP / Active Directory Authenticate and authorize users against LDAP or Active Directory | – |  | |
| Kerberos / SPNEGO Ticket-based single sign-on in Kerberos and Active Directory environments | – | | |
| JSON web tokens Stateless authentication with signed JSON web tokens | – | | |
| OpenID Connect Log in via any OIDC identity provider, e.g. Keycloak or Okta | – | | |
| SAML Single sign-on with SAML 2.0 identity providers | – | | |
| Custom authentication backends Plug in your own authentication and authorization implementations | – | | |
| Kibana Single Sign-On Sign in to Kibana once through your identity provider | – | | |
| Fine-grained access control | |||
| Document-level security Control which documents each user can see within an index | – | | |
| Field-level security Show or hide individual fields per role | – | | |
| Kibana multi-tenancy Separate dashboards and saved objects per team or tenant | – | | |
| Field anonymization Mask sensitive values like names or IPs before they are returned | – | – | |
| Immutable indices Write-once storage for tamper-proof data | – | – | |
| Audit & compliance logging | |||
| Security audit logging Record login attempts, missing privileges and security events | – | | |
| Read-access tracking Document who read which sensitive data, and when | – | – | |
| Write-access tracking Track every change to monitored indices | – | – | |
| Configuration change tracking Track every change to the security configuration | – | – | |
| System change tracking Monitor the integrity of your Elasticsearch configuration | – | – | |
| Alerting integrations | |||
| PagerDuty action Open PagerDuty incidents directly from your alerting watches | – | | |
| Jira action Create Jira issues automatically when alerts fire | – | | |
| Operations & configuration | |||
| REST management API Manage the entire security configuration via API | – | | |
| Configuration GUI Point-and-click administration in Kibana | – | | |
| Support | |||
| Community forum Ask questions and get answers from the community and the team | | | |
| SLA-based support Tickets answered by the engineers who build Search Guard | – | | |
Free forever · Apache 2.0
- TLS encryption for REST and inter-node traffic — OpenSSL support, PEM and JKS
- Role-based access control on cluster, index, transport and HTTP level
- Internal user and group management
- HTTP Basic, PKI and proxy authentication
- Full Signals alerting: Elasticsearch and external data sources, escalation levels, throttling and acknowledgement
- Email, Slack and webhook alerting actions
- Kibana access and feature control
- Hot configuration reload — no cluster reboots
Per production cluster · unlimited nodes
Everything in Community, plus:
- LDAP / Active Directory
- Kerberos / SPNEGO
- JSON web tokens
- OpenID Connect
- SAML
- Custom authentication backends
- Kibana Single Sign-On
- Document-level security
- Field-level security
- Kibana multi-tenancy
- Security audit logging
- PagerDuty action
- Jira action
- REST management API
- Configuration GUI
- SLA-based support
Everything in Enterprise, plus audit-grade compliance
Everything in Enterprise, plus:
- Field anonymization
- Immutable indices
- Read-access tracking
- Write-access tracking
- Configuration change tracking
- System change tracking
Not sure which edition fits? Talk it through with an engineer →
Customize your license
Academic & Scientific Programme
We want to give back to education and science and provide free licenses and special discounts for eligible institutions. Get in touch with us to learn more.
OEM, Integrators & Resellers
We provide tailor made custom licenses for system integrators, OEM partners and resellers.
Get your quote
Tell us how many production clusters you run and which edition you're interested in — you'll have a quote within one business day. No calls unless you want one.
- Answer within one business day
- Dev & staging included automatically
- Academic and OEM conditions available
Prefer a conversation? Book a demo with an engineer →
Pricing questions, answered
We license Search Guard per production cluster — not per node. Scale your cluster to any size without your license cost changing. Development, staging, and QA systems are included free of charge.
Any cluster serving live workloads. All non-production systems that support it — development, staging, testing, QA — are covered by the same license at no extra cost. Special setups like disaster-recovery clusters? Just ask — we'll find a sensible arrangement.
Yes. The Community Edition is licensed under Apache 2.0 and free for any use, including commercial production, with no time limit and no node limit.
Nothing disruptive — your cluster keeps running. To keep using Enterprise or Compliance features in production, simply obtain a license. Need more evaluation time? Trial extensions are usually no problem.
Yes. Universities, research institutions, and non-profits can obtain the full feature set under special conditions — get in touch and tell us about your institution.
Yes. If you ship a product or managed service built on Elasticsearch, our OEM licenses let you embed and redistribute Search Guard. Contact us for details.
More questions? See the full FAQ →
