Elastic (NYSE:ESTC) & Leafly (NASDAQ:LFLY) Critical Review

Elastic (NYSE:ESTC) and Leafly (NASDAQ:LFLY) are both business services companies, but which is the better stock? We will contrast the two businesses based on the strength of their dividends, valuation, risk, earnings, profitability, institutional ownership and analyst recommendations.

Analyst Ratings

This is a summary of current ratings for Elastic and Leafly, as reported by MarketBeat.com.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Elastic	0	6	15	0	2.71
Leafly	0	0	1	0	3.00

Elastic presently has a consensus target price of $118.05, suggesting a potential downside of 2.12%. Leafly has a consensus target price of $6.00, suggesting a potential upside of 175.23%. Given Leafly’s stronger consensus rating and higher possible upside, analysts plainly believe Leafly is more favorable than Elastic.

Profitability

This table compares Elastic and Leafly’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Elastic	4.87%	-20.83%	-6.21%
Leafly	-16.20%	N/A	-28.74%

Valuation & Earnings

This table compares Elastic and Leafly’s gross revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Elastic	$1.27 billion	9.68	$61.72 million	$0.53	227.57
Leafly	$42.25 million	0.13	-$9.50 million	($3.21)	-0.68

Elastic has higher revenue and earnings than Leafly. Leafly is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Elastic, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Institutional and Insider Ownership

97.0% of Elastic shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 15.6% of Leafly shares are owned by institutional investors. 18.1% of Elastic shares are owned by company insiders. Comparatively, 7.6% of Leafly shares are owned by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, endowments and hedge funds believe a company will outperform the market over the long term.

Risk & Volatility

Elastic has a beta of 0.98, meaning that its stock price is 2% less volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Leafly has a beta of 0.94, meaning that its stock price is 6% less volatile than the S&P 500.

Summary

Elastic beats Leafly on 11 of the 14 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Elastic

Elastic N.V., a data analytics company, delivers solutions designed to run in public or private clouds in multi-cloud environments. It primarily offers Elastic Stack, a set of software products that ingest and store data from various sources and formats, as well as performs search, analysis, and visualization on that data. The company's Elastic Stack product portfolio comprises Elasticsearch, a distributed, real-time search and analytics engine, and data store for various types of data, including textual, numerical, geospatial, structured, and unstructured; Kibana, a user interface, management, and configuration interface for the Elastic Stack; Elastic Agent that offers integrated host protection and central management services; Beats, a single-purpose data shippers for sending data from edge machines to Elasticsearch or Logstash; and Logstash, a data processing pipeline for ingesting data into Elasticsearch or other storage systems from a multitude of sources simultaneously. It also provides software solutions on the Elastic Stack that address cases, including search applications, workplace search, logs, metrics, application performance monitoring, synthetic monitoring, security information and event management (SIEM), endpoint security, extended detection and response, and cloud security. The company was incorporated in 2012 and is based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

About Leafly

Leafly Holdings, Inc. owns and operates a platform to provide consumers with cannabis information and connects consumers to cannabis brands and licensed retailers. The company offers subscription-based marketplace listings, digital advertising solutions, and software as a service-based tools to cannabis retailers; and information, reviews, menus, and ordering and delivery options to its audience through its website and mobile applications. Leafly Holdings, Inc. was founded in 2010 and is headquartered in Seattle, Washington.