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Algolia vs Elastic Search comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Algolia
Ranking in Search as a Service
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Elastic Search
Ranking in Search as a Service
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
88
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (6th), Vector Databases (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Algolia is 9.8%, up from 8.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 18.5%, up from 13.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Search18.5%
Algolia9.8%
Other71.7%
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

Zaid bin junaid  - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Manager at Flash.co
Navigation has needed simplification while AI search has delivered faster, more relevant answers
Algolia has multiple features, but the one I love most is the AI-powered relevance, which helps us search anything within our systems. It ensures that search results are optimized using accuracy and personalization for our organization. The second feature I value is real-time indexing, which provides instant updates and ensures that search results reflect the latest content and inventory. Additionally, Algolia tailors search based on user behavior. For example, as a user, it tailors the behavior by giving preferences and context. It works on LLM models, which is the main reason they are able to personalize behavior. Another feature I appreciate is the ability to monitor search performance and conversion metrics. The reason Algolia's AI-powered relevance and real-time indexing have made a difference is that the features provided have given us an outstanding service. It works extremely well with no downtime, no defects, and no bugs. Whatever we search for, it provides instant results. That is why we prefer them over others.
Vaibhav Shukla - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at Agoda
Search performance has transformed large-scale intent discovery and hybrid query handling
While Elastic Search is a good product, I see areas for improvement, particularly regarding the misconception that any amount of data can simply be dumped into Elastic Search. When creating an index, careful consideration of data massaging is essential. Elastic Search stores mappings for various data types, which must remain below a certain threshold to maintain functionality. Users need to throttle the number of fields for searching to avoid overloading the system and ensure that the design of the document is efficient for the Elastic Search index. Additionally, I suggest utilizing ILM periodically throughout the year to manage data shuffling between clusters, preventing hotspots in the distribution of requests across nodes.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The Algolia solution really helped us to improve our conversion rate and click through rate."
"It has many fine-tuning configurations. Essentially, every single piece of information you pass through it is a free document you can tailor."
"We were working with search products, brands, and different attributes specific to the product; it's faster and easier. The implementation is easy."
"The tool is worth the money, and I have seen an ROI."
"The tool is easy to use, but you need to know how it works."
"Since Algolia is a SaaS solution, we didn't have to maintain servers, look at the indexes, and monitor services."
"It's scalable. It can be scaled massively."
"Algolia provides some cool functionalities like filtering, indexing, and searching."
"Logsign provides us with the capability to execute multiple queries according to our requirements. The indexing is very high, making it effective for storing and retrieving logs. The real-time analytics with Elastic benefits us due to the huge traffic volume in our organization, which reaches up to 60,000 requests per second. With logs of approximately 25 GB per day, manually analyzing traffic behavior, payloads, headers, user agents, and other details is impractical."
"Helps us to store the data in key value pairs and, based on that, we can produce visualisations in Kibana."
"The most valuable features of Elastic Enterprise Search are it's cloud-ready and we do a lot of infrastructure as code. By using ELK, we're able to deploy the solution as part of our ISC deployment."
"It is stable."
"Using real-time search functionality to support operational decisions has been helpful."
"The most valuable feature of Elastic Enterprise Search is the opportunity to search behind and between different logs."
"The observability is the best available because it provides granular insights that identify reasons for defects."
"Overall, considering key aspects like cost, learning curve, and data indexing architecture, Elasticsearch is a very good tool."
 

Cons

"I think they could improve the analytics view."
"Joining is quite complex."
"The high cost of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The documentation is not beginner-friendly."
"Algolia is not adopted that much, and it would be great if it were made more popular."
"Algolia provides a certification, which is pretty basic, and I think it can be improved in terms of a bit more detail and more elaborative content."
"When indexing the products, one may face some issues with the tool."
"The deployment could be easier for beginners."
"Pagination in Elastic Search is very slow."
"Better dashboards or a better configuration system would be very good."
"Performance improvement could come from skipping background refresh on search idle shards (which is already being addressed in the upcoming seventh version)."
"The pricing of this product needs to be more clear because I cannot understand it when I review the website."
"It needs email notification, similar to what Logentries has. Because of the notification issue, we moved to Logentries, as it provides a simple way to receive notification whenever a server encounters an error or unexpected conditions (which we have defined using RegEx​)."
"Technical support should be faster."
"We'd like more user-friendly integrations."
"Both the graph feature and the reporting feature are a little bit lacking. The alerting also needs to be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Algolia is a cool, super-easy-to-use, and affordable tool."
"We are currently on a contract with Algolia for licensing and price."
"I have heard that Algolia is an expensive solution."
"In terms of the cost of Algolia, the tool is really expensive for us in Brazil since it comes to about half a million dollars."
"The product is cheap."
"For any developer starting out, it is worth it."
"The version of Elastic Enterprise Search I am using is open source which is free. The pricing model should improve for the enterprise version because it is very expensive."
"The premium license is expensive."
"This product is open-source and can be used free of charge."
"The price could be better."
"We use the free version for some logs, but not extensive use."
"I rate Elastic Search's pricing an eight out of ten."
"To access all the features available you require both the open source license and the production license."
"The solution is free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
14%
Performing Arts
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
University
7%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise43
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Algolia?
The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Algolia are based on a pay-as-you-go model, which is very efficient. The costs are very transparent and have detailed breakdowns for any kind of queries c...
What needs improvement with Algolia?
Algolia provides good value for money. However, personally, I feel the UI is a bit difficult to understand and could be more user-centric. The navigation part of Algolia is different from other too...
What is your primary use case for Algolia?
Algolia is used in my organization primarily for AI search to enhance product search for recommendations. It helps us support our knowledge bases, particularly Confluence, and maximizes the outcome...
What do you like most about ELK Elasticsearch?
Logsign provides us with the capability to execute multiple queries according to our requirements. The indexing is very high, making it effective for storing and retrieving logs. The real-time anal...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ELK Elasticsearch?
Elastic Search's pricing totally depends on the server. Managed services from AWS are used, and we have worked on a self-managed Elastic Search cluster. On the AWS side, it is very expensive becaus...
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
To be honest, there is only one downside of Elastic Search that makes sense because we use a basic license, which is a free license. We do not have some features available because of the free licen...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Birchbox, Twitch, Lacoste, Stripe, WW, Medium, Cousera, National Geographic, Zendesk, Magento
T-Mobile, Adobe, Booking.com, BMW, Telegraph Media Group, Cisco, Karbon, Deezer, NORBr, Labelbox, Fingerprint, Relativity, NHS Hospital, Met Office, Proximus, Go1, Mentat, Bluestone Analytics, Humanz, Hutch, Auchan, Sitecore, Linklaters, Socren, Infotrack, Pfizer, Engadget, Airbus, Grab, Vimeo, Ticketmaster, Asana, Twilio, Blizzard, Comcast, RWE and many others.
Find out what your peers are saying about Algolia vs. Elastic Search and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.