Elastic (NYSE:ESTC) vs. Intrusion (NASDAQ:INTZ) Critical Survey

Elastic (NYSE:ESTC) and Intrusion (NASDAQ:INTZ) are both technology companies, but which is the better investment? We will contrast the two companies based on the strength of their dividends, valuation, profitability, institutional ownership, risk, analyst recommendations and earnings.

Risk & Volatility

Elastic has a beta of 0.98, meaning that its stock price is 2% less volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Intrusion has a beta of -1.57, meaning that its stock price is 257% less volatile than the S&P 500.

Profitability

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

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Elastic	21.14%	-1.82%	-0.67%
Intrusion	-191.24%	-159.79%	-103.80%

Institutional & Insider Ownership

97.0% of Elastic shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 19.4% of Intrusion shares are held by institutional investors. 12.7% of Elastic shares are held by insiders. Comparatively, 10.1% of Intrusion shares are held by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that hedge funds, endowments and large money managers believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.

Valuation & Earnings

This table compares Elastic and Intrusion”s top-line revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Elastic	$1.74 billion	5.17	$367.77 million	$3.50	24.70
Intrusion	$7.09 million	2.32	-$9.06 million	($0.52)	-1.29

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

Analyst Recommendations

This is a breakdown of current ratings for Elastic and Intrusion, as provided by MarketBeat.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Elastic	0	13	17	0	2.57
Intrusion	1	2	1	0	2.00

Elastic presently has a consensus target price of $79.70, indicating a potential downside of 7.81%. Intrusion has a consensus target price of $5.25, indicating a potential upside of 683.58%. Given Intrusion’s higher probable upside, analysts clearly believe Intrusion is more favorable than Elastic.

Summary

Elastic beats Intrusion on 13 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 Intrusion

Intrusion Inc., a cybersecurity company in the United States. The company offers its customers access to threat intelligence database, which contains the historical data, known associations, and reputational behavior of Internet Protocol addresses. It offers INTRUSION Shield, a zero trust reputation-based Software as a Service solution that inspects and kills dangerous network connections. The company also provides INTRUSION TraceCop, a big data tool that contains an inventory of network selectors and enrichments to support forensic investigations; and INTRUSION Savant, a network monitoring solution that uses the data available in TraceCop to identify suspicious traffic in real-time. In addition, it engages in the provision of pre-and post-sales support services, such as network security design, system installation, and technical consulting services. The company serves US federal government entities, state and local government entities, and companies ranging from mid-market to large enterprises through a direct sales force and value-added resellers. The company was formerly known as Intrusion.com, Inc. and changed its name to Intrusion Inc. in November 2001. Intrusion Inc. was founded in 1983 and is headquartered in Plano, Texas.