Elastic (NYSE:ESTC) & UiPath (NYSE:PATH) Critical Comparison

Elastic (NYSE:ESTC) and UiPath (NYSE:PATH) are both mid-cap computer and technology companies, but which is the better business? We will contrast the two businesses based on the strength of their institutional ownership, dividends, analyst recommendations, profitability, earnings, valuation and risk.

Analyst Recommendations

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

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Elastic	1	13	17	0	2.52
UiPath	1	14	3	0	2.11

Elastic presently has a consensus target price of $90.77, suggesting a potential upside of 79.65%. UiPath has a consensus target price of $14.07, suggesting a potential upside of 36.77%. Given Elastic’s stronger consensus rating and higher possible upside, equities analysts clearly believe Elastic is more favorable than UiPath.

Institutional & Insider Ownership

97.0% of Elastic shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 62.5% of UiPath shares are held by institutional investors. 12.7% of Elastic shares are held by company insiders. Comparatively, 23.2% of UiPath shares are held by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, hedge funds and endowments believe a company is poised for long-term growth.

Valuation & Earnings

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

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Elastic	$1.68 billion	3.12	-$108.11 million	($0.80)	-63.16
UiPath	$1.61 billion	3.35	$282.33 million	$0.52	19.78

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

Volatility & Risk

Elastic has a beta of 0.88, suggesting that its share price is 12% less volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, UiPath has a beta of 0.91, suggesting that its share price is 9% less volatile than the S&P 500.

Profitability

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

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Elastic	-5.04%	-2.34%	-0.84%
UiPath	17.53%	5.69%	3.71%

Summary

UiPath beats Elastic on 9 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 UiPath

UiPath Inc. provides an end-to-end automation platform that offers a range of robotic process automation (RPA) solutions primarily in the United States, Romania, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and internationally. The company offers a suite of interrelated software to build, manage, run, engage, measure, and govern automation within the organization. Its platform's embedded AI, ML, and NLP capabilities improve decisioning and information processing; emulate human behavior allows organizations to address a myriad of use cases; emulate human behavior allows organizations to address a myriad of use cases; multi-tenant platform enterprise deployment with security and governance and Automation Cloud, which enables customers to begin automating without the need to provision infrastructure, install applications, or perform additional configurations; intuitive interface and low-code, drag-and-drop functionality; signed to enable people and automations to work together; and tracks, measures, and forecasts the performance of automations, enables customers to gain powerful insights and generate key performance indicators with actionable metric. It serves banking and financial services, healthcare, insurance, public sectors, manufacturing, retail, and telecom industries. The company was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in New York, New York.