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Amazon AWS CloudSearch 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

Amazon AWS CloudSearch
Ranking in Search as a Service
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Elastic Search
Ranking in Search as a Service
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
72
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (10th), Vector Databases (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS CloudSearch is 8.0%, down from 10.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 18.6%, up from 9.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

AmrIssa - PeerSpot reviewer
A scalable and fully managed search service with diverse data type support and robust security
We use it as our hosting solution, serving as the backbone for our systems, which include Rubrik and SAP It is remarkably efficient and beneficial. A reboot should be enhanced. There are issues with the VBC collection. I have been working with it for four years. I would rate the stability ten…
Anand_Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Captures data from all other sources and becomes a MOM aka monitoring of monitors
Scalability and ROI are the areas they have to improve. Their license terms are based on the number of cores. If you increase the number of cores, it becomes very difficult to manage at a large scale. For example, if I have a $3 million project, I won't sell it because if we're dealing with a 10 TB or 50 TB system, there are a lot of systems and applications to monitor, and I have to make an MOM (Mean of Max) for everything. This is because of the cost impact. Also, when you have horizontal scaling, it's like a multi-story building with only one elevator. You have to run around, and it's not efficient. Even the smallest task becomes difficult. That's the problem with horizontal scaling. They need to improve this because if they increase the cores and adjust the licensing accordingly, it would make more sense.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Document indexing, text-based search API, and Geospatial searches are all good features."
"The best feature is its scalability in that Cloud is always on the fly."
"It's the best solution for any company. It has a hosting ERP system for any task. AWS is stable. AWS is more flexible and its elastic concept is a new concept. AWS is also very secure. It has many layers of security, like hardware security and software security. This is a big issue."
"AWS CloudSearch's best features are good performance under high CPU and memory use, and ease of deployment and scaling."
"The quality of the solution is good."
"I've found the solution to be very scalable."
"CDN service reduces latency when accessing our web application."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon AWS CloudSearch is its ability to receive data quickly. You can access your data easily in a short time."
"The forced merge and forced resonate features reduce the data size increasing reliability."
"We can easily collect all the data and view historical trends using the product. We can view the applications and identify the issues effectively."
"The initial setup is very easy for small environments."
"I really like the visualization that you can do within it. That's really handy. Product-wise, it is a very good and stable product."
"We had many reasons to implement Elasticsearch for search term solutions. Elasticsearch products provide enterprise landscape support for different areas of the company."
"The observability is the best available because it provides granular insights that identify reasons for defects."
"Elasticsearch includes a graphical user interface (GUI) called Kibana. The GUI features are extremely beneficial to us."
"I value the feature that allows me to share the dashboards to different people with different levels of access."
 

Cons

"The solution should improve the recovery aspects that it has on offer."
"We'd like to see more database features."
"Index cleanup is sometimes painful. No easy way to clean indexes or a bulk of documents. Full indexing or regeneration of entire indexes sometimes gets stuck. In one instance, we had to delete the entire index and re-create it."
"Security is a concern but they're working on it."
"Amazon AWS CloudSearch is highly stable. However, the speed depends on your internet connection."
"The price of the solution can be expensive."
"AWS CloudSearch's documentation isn't very clear. Also, the on-premise version of the solution is less stable than the cloud version."
"I would say that it needs to keep its cost competitive in the market, especially in comparison to other clouds."
"Kibana should be more friendly, especially when building dashboards."
"The GUI is the part of the program which has the most room for improvement."
"The pricing of this product needs to be more clear because I cannot understand it when I review the website."
"Scalability and ROI are the areas they have to improve."
"They're making changes in their architecture too frequently."
"The metadata gets stored along with indexes and isn't queryable."
"Dashboards could be more flexible, and it would be nice to provide more drill-down capabilities."
"Elastic Enterprise Search can improve by adding some kind of search that can be used out of the box without too much struggle with configuration. With every kind of search engine, there is some kind of special function that you need to do. A simple out-of-the-box search would be useful."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There was no license needed to use this solution."
"Our license costs around $4,000 per month."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one point is cheap, and ten points are expensive, I rate the pricing as medium or reasonable."
"Amazon AWS CloudSearch charging is based on how many resources you consume or and the solution is known to be a bit expensive."
"We chose AWS because of its cost and stability."
"In comparison to IBM and Microsoft, the pricing is more favorable."
"I'm not sure how much we pay a year. It might be around $30,000 a year."
"The solution is less expensive than Stackdriver and Grafana."
"The pricing structure depends on the scalability steps."
"It can be expensive."
"The pricing model is questionable and needs to be addressed because when you would like to have the security they charge per machine."
"The solution is free."
"To access all the features available you require both the open source license and the production license."
"The cost varies based on factors like usage volume, network load, data storage size, and service utilization. If your usage isn't too extensive, the cost will be lower."
"we are using a licensed version of the product."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
9%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon AWS CloudSearch?
In comparison to IBM and Microsoft, the pricing is more favorable. I would rate it eight out of ten.
What needs improvement with Amazon AWS CloudSearch?
A reboot should be enhanced. There are issues with the VBC collection.
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?
We used the open-source version of Elasticsearch, which was free.
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
It would be useful if a feature for renaming indices could be added without affecting the performance of other features. However, overall, the consistency and stability of Elasticsearch are already...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

SmugMug
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 Amazon AWS CloudSearch vs. Elastic Search and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.