The only vendor standing: Elastic’s clean sweep in 2025 AV-Comparatives Tests

In the current threat landscape, the margin for error is nonexistent. According to the IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025,¹ the average cost of a data breach in the US has surged to a record $10.22 million — a 9% increase from the previous year. For security teams, this reality creates a high-pressure environment where every missed signal or allowed compromise can spiral into a headline-making crisis.

Too often, organizations are forced to choose between strict protection and user experience, sacrificing speed for security or accepting higher risk to keep business moving.

We believe you shouldn't have to choose.

The latest AV-Comparatives Business Security Test (December 2025) validates this belief, providing objective, third-party proof that Elastic Security delivers market-leading efficacy without compromise.

Elastic Security combines SIEM, XDR, and cloud security into a single, unified platform, built with the analyst experience top-of-mind. Our high efficacy is driven by:

• Advanced behavioral analysis: Moving beyond simple signatures, Elastic Defend watches for malicious behaviors and attack chains, allowing it to stop zero-day and file-less attacks that bypass traditional security tools.
• Expert-infused prevention: Elastic Security Labs brings deep-rooted expertise to your defense, drawing on hundreds of thousands of hours of counter-intelligence experience (and counting). This ongoing human insight is operationalized into every prevention rule, ensuring your organization is protected by a team that understands attacker psychology just as deeply as they understand technical vulnerabilities.
• Consistency regardless of connectivity: Modern infrastructure is rarely uniform, which is why Elastic delivers the same prevention efficacy whether an endpoint is online, in a hybrid setup, or completely air-gapped. This ensures that your most critical, isolated assets receive the exact same level of advanced behavioral protection as your cloud-connected workforce, without compromising on security or performance. 
• Machine learning for evasion resistance: Elastic’s sophisticated machine learning models are continuously trained on vast amounts of threat data, including the expertise from Elastic Security Labs, enabling precise detection and making the solution highly resistant to sophisticated evasion techniques.
• Preventative controls: The platform integrates robust prevention capabilities, including memory protection and anti-malware scanning, ensuring threats are neutralized before they can execute.

This test considers scenarios where malware pre-exists on the disk or enters the system via local area networks or removable devices.

• Elastic result: Achieved 100% detection rate
• False alarms: Scored a perfect result with zero false alarms on common business software

AV-Comparatives identifies Elastic Security, along with CrowdStrike, Cisco, and Trellix, as "exceptionally powerful" solutions best suited for complex, high-growth organizations. The report notes that these platforms offer capabilities that surpass those of smaller packages, making them essential for enterprises planning for the future.

However, among these enterprise leaders, Elastic stands apart by delivering this power without compromise. While incumbents like CrowdStrike, Cisco, and Trellix fell short in the critical Real-World Protection Test — allowing compromises and missing active threats — Elastic achieved a flawless 100% protection rate. This validates that Elastic Security provides the sophisticated, high-performance tooling your SOC needs, backed by the verified 100% efficacy your business demands.

True enterprise readiness means adapting to your infrastructure, not the other way around. That’s why Elastic Security meets you where you are, delivering advanced AI analytics and prevention in a single architecture that runs anywhere — whether serverless, private cloud, or fully air-gapped.

Modern attacks don't respect boundaries; they pivot across endpoints, cloud workloads, and networks. XDR represents a critical evolution in security, correlating data across these diverse environments to expose complex threats that standalone EDR misses.

Elastic Security unifies your defense, protecting data wherever it resides. By providing limitless ingestion and analysis, we help teams improve detection efficacy and reduce risk.

• Extended visibility: Eliminate blind spots with a unified view of endpoints, networks, and cloud environments. With hundreds of integrations and AI-driven Automatic Import, your team can seamlessly onboard data from any source to visualize the full scope of an attack.
• XDR capabilities: Detect sophisticated threats using AI-driven analytics that correlate data across your entire ecosystem. We cut through the noise with hundreds of prebuilt detection rules mapped to MITRE ATT&CK®, expert content from Elastic Security Labs, and over 75 machine learning models designed to spot anomalies in user and host behavior. But we don’t just generate more alerts. With the power of large language models (LLMs), Attack Discovery analyzes the alerts in your environment to correlate them and identify threats. Each “discovery” represents a potential attack by describing the relationships among multiple alerts, telling you which users and hosts are involved and which threat actor might be responsible. 
• Native and third-party responses: Elastic empowers analysts to stop attacks immediately with a comprehensive suite of native and third-party response actions, streamlining workflows and reducing dwell time.

We believe XDR is a necessity, not a luxury. That’s why full XDR capabilities are included in Elastic Security without hidden costs or "optional" licenses. With no arbitrary tier limits or fees, you have the flexibility to secure your entire infrastructure without budget friction.