Financial Survey: ANSYS (NASDAQ:ANSS) & Elastic (NYSE:ESTC)

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

Analyst Ratings

This is a breakdown of recent ratings and recommmendations for Elastic and ANSYS, as provided by MarketBeat.com.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Elastic	0	7	18	1	2.77
ANSYS	0	2	1	0	2.33

Elastic currently has a consensus target price of $127.48, indicating a potential upside of 50.35%. ANSYS has a consensus target price of $352.50, indicating a potential upside of 10.85%. Given Elastic’s stronger consensus rating and higher probable upside, analysts plainly believe Elastic is more favorable than ANSYS.

Risk & Volatility

Elastic has a beta of 1.19, suggesting that its stock price is 19% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, ANSYS has a beta of 1.2, suggesting that its stock price is 20% more volatile than the S&P 500.

Institutional & Insider Ownership

97.0% of Elastic shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 92.4% of ANSYS shares are owned by institutional investors. 15.9% of Elastic shares are owned by company insiders. Comparatively, 0.5% of ANSYS shares are owned by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, hedge funds and large money managers believe a stock is poised for long-term growth.

Profitability

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

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Elastic	4.39%	-13.20%	-4.59%
ANSYS	22.62%	12.69%	9.65%

Valuation & Earnings

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

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Elastic	$1.43 billion	6.19	$61.72 million	($1.30)	-65.22
ANSYS	$2.54 billion	10.95	$575.69 million	$6.55	48.55

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

Summary

ANSYS beats Elastic on 8 of the 15 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 ANSYS

ANSYS, Inc. develops and markets engineering simulation software and services for engineers, designers, researchers, and students in the United States, Japan, Germany, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, rest of Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and internationally. It offers structural analysis product suite that provides simulation tools for product design and optimization; the Ansys Mechanical product, an element analysis software; LS-DYNA solver for multiphysics simulation; and power analysis and optimization software suite. The company also offers electronics product suite that provides electromagnetic field simulation software for designing electronic and electromechanical products; Ansys High Frequency Structure Simulator product for radio frequency and microwave design; SCADE product suite, a solution for embedded software simulation, code production, and automated certification; fluids product suite that enables modeling of fluid flow and other related physical phenomena; Ansys Fluent computational fluid dynamics software package; Ansys RedHawk-SC for electronic design automation; Ansys Optics software; and mission-simulation, modeling, testing, and analysis software. In addition, it offers Ansys Granta MI system for materials information management; Ansys Granta Selector technology for materials selection and graphical analysis; CES EduPack product, a set of teaching resources; Granta Materials Data for Simulation; Ansys Lumerical product, a photonics simulation software solution; safety-certified embedded software solutions; Discovery product family for use in the simulation of product design; academic product suite for research and teaching settings. ANSYS, Inc. was founded in 1970 and is headquartered in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania.