Elastic vs Smartsheet: Strategic Comparison

This in-depth comparison examines Elastic and Smartsheet across revenue, market value, business model, competitive positioning, and long-term growth strategy. Whether you are researching Elastic on its own, evaluating Smartsheet, or weighing the two companies side by side, the breakdown below highlights where each company leads and where the gap between Elastic and Smartsheet is widest.

On the headline numbers, annual revenue is $1.7B (FY2026) for Elastic and $958.3M (FY2024) for Smartsheet, while their respective market capitalizations stand at $9.3B and $8.4B. Both Elastic and Smartsheet are headquartered in United States. Their local markets and applicable rules may still differ.

Elastic: Elastic is the commercial company behind Elasticsearch. Retailers use it for product search, banks and governments use it to store and search security logs, and engineering teams use it to troubleshoot outages from logs, metrics and traces. Since 2023 the company has repositioned around "Search AI," selling Elasticsearch as a vector database and retrieval engine for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and AI agents. The parent, Elastic N.V., is incorporated in the Netherlands, but its executive office and largest operations are in the United States. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California.

Smartsheet: Smartsheet builds work management software that looks like a spreadsheet but behaves like a shared database, with Gantt, card, calendar and dashboard views, automated workflows and portfolio reporting. It is used by large enterprises and US government agencies for project and program tracking. Since its January 2025 take-private by Blackstone and Vista, the company has been repositioning itself around what it calls Intelligent Work Management, adding generative and agentic AI features announced at ENGAGE 2025. The company is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington.

Elastic and Smartsheet pursue distinct approaches to generating revenue, and understanding how each company operates is the foundation of any fair comparison between Elastic and Smartsheet.

Elastic business model: Elastic is a B2B software company with an open-core model. Its core Elasticsearch and Kibana code is free to download, and the company makes money by selling paid subscriptions that add advanced features (machine learning, security analytics, AI assistants, enterprise support) and by running the software for customers as Elastic Cloud on AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Cloud customers pay largely based on consumption of compute and storage, so revenue grows as customers index and search more data. Subscriptions accounted for $1.634 billion of Elastic's $1.739 billion fiscal 2026 revenue; the rest came from professional services and training. Elastic packages the platform into three solutions: Search & AI (application search, RAG and vector search), Observability (logs, metrics, traces, APM) and Security (SIEM, XDR, endpoint protection).

Smartsheet business model: Smartsheet sells software subscriptions. Customers pay per user on tiered plans (Pro, Business, Enterprise) and can add premium capabilities such as Control Center, Dynamic View, Data Shuttle, Bridge, Resource Management and Brandfolder digital asset management. Subscriptions made up about 95% of revenue in its last public quarter (Q3 fiscal 2025: $273.7 million of $286.9 million), with the rest from professional services such as implementation and consulting. Growth follows a land-and-expand pattern: a team adopts Smartsheet, usage spreads across departments, and the account converts to an enterprise agreement.

The durability of a company's moat often decides long-term winners. Here is how the competitive advantages of Elastic stack up against those of Smartsheet.

Elastic competitive advantage: Elastic's main edge is that one data store handles text search, vector search, analytics, logs and security events. Elasticsearch is built on Apache Lucene's inverted index, which makes full-text search across very large unstructured datasets fast, and the company has added dense vector search, hybrid ranking (BM25 plus vectors with reciprocal rank fusion), the ES|QL query language and Jina AI embedding and reranker models. More than a decade of open-source distribution means many engineers already know the stack, which lowers adoption friction inside large enterprises.

Smartsheet competitive advantage: Smartsheet's main advantage is a familiar grid interface that lets non-technical business users start quickly, paired with enterprise controls (Control Center for portfolio provisioning, Dynamic View for restricted sharing, admin governance) and a FedRAMP-authorized Smartsheet Gov environment for public-sector buyers.

Future prospects matter as much as current results. The growth strategies below explain how Elastic and Smartsheet each plan to expand from here.

Elastic growth strategy: Elastic's strategy is to make Elasticsearch the retrieval layer for enterprise AI while consolidating observability and security tools onto the same platform. Recent moves include buying Jina AI (embeddings and rerankers) and Keep (AIOps alert management) in 2025, launching Elastic Workflows and Agent Builder for agentic automation, and releasing a serverless vector database in September 2026. The sales focus is on large customers: the >$100K ACV cohort grew by its largest-ever quarterly net addition in Q1 FY2027.

Smartsheet growth strategy: Under CEO Rajeev Singh, Smartsheet is focusing on enterprise AI: the November 2025 ENGAGE launch added AI agents and data features to the platform. It has also cut costs through two rounds of layoffs, rebuilt its executive team and revamped its partner program in 2026 to lean more on channel sales.

A closer look at the financial trajectory of Elastic and Smartsheet rounds out the comparison.

Elastic: Elastic's revenue grew from $862 million in fiscal 2022 to $1.739 billion in fiscal 2026. FY2026 subscription revenue was $1.634 billion (+18%), and sales-led subscription revenue, which excludes monthly self-serve cloud, was $1.438 billion (+20%). Non-GAAP operating income reached $285 million (16.4% margin) and adjusted free cash flow $346 million (20% margin), though GAAP operating loss was $33 million. GAAP net income of $367.8 million was lifted by a fourth-quarter income tax benefit, since the company's operations were not profitable on a GAAP basis. In Q1 FY2027 (ended July 31, 2026) revenue rose 15% to $478 million, cRPO grew 21% to $1.153 billion, and Elastic raised FY2027 revenue guidance to $1.998-$2.010 billion. Elastic N.V. is a major search and observability enterprise software company, sustaining a market valuation typically over $7 billion.

Smartsheet: Smartsheet grew revenue from $67.0 million in fiscal 2017 to $958.3 million in fiscal 2024 (year ended January 31, 2024), a 25% increase that year, while the GAAP net loss narrowed from $215.6 million in fiscal 2023 to $104.6 million. In its last reported quarter as a public company, Q3 fiscal 2025, revenue rose 17% to $286.9 million, ARR grew 15% and the company posted $1.3 million of GAAP net income. As a private company since January 2025, it no longer publishes results. Smartsheet Inc. is a major American enterprise software company providing cloud-based work management and collaboration tools, sustaining a market valuation typically over $8 billion.