Head to Head Analysis: Coursera (NYSE:COUR) and Elastic (NYSE:ESTC)

Coursera (NYSE:COUR) and Elastic (NYSE:ESTC) are both business services companies, but which is the superior business? We will compare the two companies based on the strength of their risk, valuation, analyst recommendations, dividends, earnings, institutional ownership and profitability.

Analyst Ratings

This is a breakdown of recent recommendations for Coursera and Elastic, as provided by MarketBeat.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Coursera	1	1	9	0	2.73
Elastic	0	8	16	0	2.67

Coursera presently has a consensus target price of $10.93, indicating a potential upside of 57.31%. Elastic has a consensus target price of $103.71, indicating a potential upside of 29.27%. Given Coursera’s stronger consensus rating and higher possible upside, equities analysts plainly believe Coursera is more favorable than Elastic.

Profitability

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

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Coursera	-14.35%	-13.92%	-9.23%
Elastic	4.62%	-17.54%	-5.69%

Volatility & Risk

Coursera has a beta of 1.42, suggesting that its stock price is 42% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Elastic has a beta of 0.94, suggesting that its stock price is 6% less volatile than the S&P 500.

Valuation & Earnings

This table compares Coursera and Elastic”s revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Coursera	$684.37 million	1.59	-$116.55 million	($0.51)	-13.62
Elastic	$1.32 billion	6.18	$61.72 million	$0.53	151.38

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

Institutional & Insider Ownership

89.6% of Coursera shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 97.0% of Elastic shares are owned by institutional investors. 16.3% of Coursera shares are owned by company insiders. Comparatively, 18.1% of Elastic shares are owned by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that hedge funds, endowments and large money managers believe a stock is poised for long-term growth.

Summary

Elastic beats Coursera on 10 of the 14 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Coursera

Coursera, Inc. operates an online educational content platform in the United States, Europe, Africa, the Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and internationally. It operates in three segments: Consumer, Enterprise, and Degrees. The company offers guided projects, courses, and specializations, as well as online degrees; and certificates for entry-level professional, non-entry level professional, university, and MasterTrack. It offers its products to individuals, enterprise, business, campus, and government. The company was formerly known as Dkandu, Inc. and changed its name to Coursera, Inc. in April 2012. Coursera, Inc. was incorporated in 2011 and is headquartered in Mountain View, California.

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.