Reviewing Coursera (NYSE:COUR) and Elastic (NYSE:ESTC)

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

Insider and Institutional Ownership

97.0% of Elastic shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 89.6% of Coursera shares are held by institutional investors. 18.1% of Elastic shares are held by insiders. Comparatively, 16.3% of Coursera shares are held by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that hedge funds, large money managers and endowments believe a company will outperform the market over the long term.

Profitability

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

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

Analyst Ratings

This is a summary of current ratings and price targets for Elastic and Coursera, as provided by MarketBeat.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Elastic	0	8	16	0	2.67
Coursera	1	2	9	0	2.67

Elastic presently has a consensus target price of $103.71, suggesting a potential upside of 30.70%. Coursera has a consensus target price of $11.66, suggesting a potential upside of 69.59%. Given Coursera’s higher possible upside, analysts plainly believe Coursera is more favorable than Elastic.

Volatility and Risk

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

Earnings and Valuation

This table compares Elastic and Coursera”s top-line revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Elastic	$1.32 billion	6.11	$61.72 million	$0.53	149.72
Coursera	$673.83 million	1.59	-$116.55 million	($0.69)	-9.96

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.

Summary

Elastic beats Coursera on 10 of the 13 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 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.