BetterCloud is well suited for small to medium sized companies where a small technology support team can exponentially improve their capacity thru the available automation. When a company's data set starts to grow larger than 50-60 million objects and ~30k+ users there is still a good return on the investment but the population that BetterCloud has catered to for so long does not seem to be plentiful and shared experiences and community are just not there. Where a company that size might have a handful of technically capable team members that push for functionality that doesn't seem niche, there isn't much of a crowd to bounce those large scale ideas off of.
Elasticsearch is a really scalable solution that can fit a lot of needs, but the bigger and/or those needs become, the more understanding & infrastructure you will need for your instance to be running correctly. Elasticsearch is not problem-free - you can get yourself in a lot of trouble if you are not following good practices and/or if are not managing the cluster correctly. Licensing is a big decision point here as Elasticsearch is a middleware component - be sure to read the licensing agreement of the version you want to try before you commit to it. Same goes for long-term support - be sure to keep yourself in the know for this aspect you may end up stuck with an unpatched version for years.
Allows us to quickly audit and assign delegates to email account, something that's completely missing in Google as an administrative function
Allows us to automate offboarding of a Google account
Allows us to perform bulk actions, like assigning email signatures and forwarding to hundreds of accounts at a time
Allows us to audit Google Drive files. Orphaned files are very common in Google Workspace, and BetterCloud allows us to find them and take ownership of them.
As I mentioned before, Elasticsearch's flexible data model is unparalleled. You can nest fields as deeply as you want, have as many fields as you want, but whatever you want in those fields (as long as it stays the same type), and all of it will be searchable and you don't need to even declare a schema beforehand!
Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, is super strong financially and they have a great team of devs and product managers working on Elasticsearch. When I first started using ES 3 years ago, I was 90% impressed and knew it would be a good fit. 3 years later, I am 200% impressed and blown away by how far it has come and gotten even better. If there are features that are missing or you don't think it's fast enough right now, I bet it'll be suitable next year because the team behind it is so dang fast!
Elasticsearch is really, really stable. It takes a lot to bring down a cluster. It's self-balancing algorithms, leader-election system, self-healing properties are state of the art. We've never seen network failures or hard-drive corruption or CPU bugs bring down an ES cluster.
To get started with Elasticsearch, you don't have to get very involved in configuring what really is an incredibly complex system under the hood. You simply install the package, run the service, and you're immediately able to begin using it. You don't need to learn any sort of query language to add data to Elasticsearch or perform some basic searching. If you're used to any sort of RESTful API, getting started with Elasticsearch is a breeze. If you've never interacted with a RESTful API directly, the journey may be a little more bumpy. Overall, though, it's incredibly simple to use for what it's doing under the covers.
Support for BetterCloud is excellent. They have fantastic email support who are very responsive and knowledgeable, but more importantly they have chat support that are absolutely top-notch. They have not only the knowledge to answer and help, but the capability to solve without escalations or runarounds. These support folks are the real deal.
We've only used it as an opensource tooling. We did not purchase any additional support to roll out the elasticsearch software. When rolling out the application on our platform we've used the documentation which was available online. During our test phases we did not experience any bugs or issues so we did not rely on support at all.
BetterCloud has a much more friendly UI when it comes to building workflows as I've mentioned before. Our team has visited Okta workflows a number of times but it was incredibly difficult to replicate our current BetterCloud workflows into Okta because the Okta UI for workflow building is hard to follow and create
As far as we are concerned, Elasticsearch is the gold standard and we have barely evaluated any alternatives. You could consider it an alternative to a relational or NoSQL database, so in cases where those suffice, you don't need Elasticsearch. But if you want powerful text-based search capabilities across large data sets, Elasticsearch is the way to go.
We have had great luck with implementing Elasticsearch for our search and analytics use cases.
While the operational burden is not minimal, operating a cluster of servers, using a custom query language, writing Elasticsearch-specific bulk insert code, the performance and the relative operational ease of Elasticsearch are unparalleled.
We've easily saved hundreds of thousands of dollars implementing Elasticsearch vs. RDBMS vs. other no-SQL solutions for our specific set of problems.
