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Amazon Kendra vs Azure AI Search comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

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 Kendra
Ranking in Search as a Service
8th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Azure AI Search
Ranking in Search as a Service
5th
Average Rating
7.6
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon Kendra is 5.7%, down from 14.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Azure AI Search is 10.3%, down from 13.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Azure AI Search10.3%
Amazon Kendra5.7%
Other84.0%
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

AM
Architect at IGT Solutions
Kendra has a nice AI built-in, enhancing the search experience and highly stable solution
There are many valuable features. For example, there are many documents that contain a lot of legal information. So we want to understand whether all the documents have the required complaint-related information or not, and whether they are following the standard policies of documentation. We have multiple documents, so we don't know which document has the sought-after information. Therefore, we want to perform an enterprise search on it. So there are a lot of use cases we are trying to build using these newer technologies, specifically Kendra. Moreover, Kendra has AI, which has an upper edge, and that is really helpful. It has a nice AI inbuilt, which improves the search part of it.
Prabakaran SP - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Architect at a financial services firm with 1-10 employees
Automated indexing has streamlined document search workflows but semantic relevance and setup complexity still need improvement
We used the semantic search capabilities of Azure AI Search, but we haven't gotten good results in the semantic search. So we are exploring with ChromaDB, and Cosmos is having the capability of doing the semantic search as well. We are exploring that. A few queries we use analytics search, which works and is good. Analytics search is good. We are trying the ML capabilities of the product since we are using Databricks and other tools for building the models, MLflow, and related items. We are still working on proof of concepts, which could be better with ChromaDB or Cosmos or vector search or inbuilt Databricks vector stores. Language processing is not about user intention; it's about the context. If there is a document and you want to know the context of a particular section, then we would use vector search. Instead of traversing through the whole document, while chunking it into the vector, we'll categorize and chunk, and then we'll look only at those chunks to do a semantic search. When comparing Azure AI Search, I'm doing a proof of concept because with ChromaDB I can create instances using LangChain anywhere. For per session, I can create one ChromaDB and can remove it, which is really useful for proof of concepts. Instead of creating an Azure AI Search instance and doing that there, that is one advantage I'm seeing for the proof of concept alone, not for the entire product. I hope it should support all the embedding providers as well. Is there a viewer or tool similar to Storage Explorer? We are basically SQL-centric people, so we used to find Cosmos DB very quick for us when we search something and create indexes. I guess there is some limitation in Azure AI Search. I couldn't remember now, such as querying limitations. I'm not remembering that part.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Until recently, there wasn't an out-of-the-box service in the market for enterprise documents like Kendra."
"Provides flexibility to tune the relevance and ranking of results."
"We have good use cases where stability is everything. So it's a stable solution."
"The amount of flexibility and agility is really assuring."
"Usually, that search functionality used to take around 10 secs to search data, and that time has been reduced to a few milliseconds now."
"The product is extremely configurable, allowing you to customize the search experience to suit your needs."
"Azure AI Search has impacted my organization positively with overall time saving and low costs as the main outputs that we get after using it."
"It provides good access capabilities to various platforms."
"The solution's initial setup is straightforward."
"The customer engagement was good."
"The broad access capability is probably the most valuable feature, as it provides access with hardly any physical infrastructure."
 

Cons

"The time it takes for indexing documents could be reduced."
"This is a really, really expensive solution making the adoption of it very difficult at the enterprise level."
"There are some token limits."
"We used the semantic search capabilities of Azure AI Search, but we haven't gotten good results in the semantic search."
"On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Azure Search as probably a six-out-of-ten."
"Adding items to Azure Search using its .NET APIs sometimes throws exceptions."
"The initial setup is not as easy as it should be."
"For availability, expanding its use to all Azure datacenters would be helpful in increasing awareness and usage of the product.​"
"The after-hour services are slow."
"For SDKs, Azure Search currently offers solutions for .NET and Python. Additional platforms would be welcomed, especially native iOS and Android solutions for mobile development."
"Azure AI Search could be improved regarding compatibility with Azure Blob Storage in order to keep the prompts and everything that I am using for building the tool safe."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing falls in the medium range."
"For the actual costs, I encourage users to view the pricing page on the Azure site for details.​"
"The cost is comparable."
"The solution is affordable."
"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, where one is the low price, and ten is the high price."
"​When telling people about the product, I always encourage them to set up a new service using the free pricing tier. This allows them to learn about the product and its capabilities in a risk-free environment. Depending on their needs, the free tier may be suitable for their projects, however enterprise applications will most likely required a higher, paid tier."
"I think the solution's pricing is ok compared to other cloud devices."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Retailer
5%
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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What needs improvement with Azure Search?
We used the semantic search capabilities of Azure AI Search, but we haven't gotten good results in the semantic search. So we are exploring with ChromaDB, and Cosmos is having the capability of doi...
What is your primary use case for Azure Search?
Our use case for Azure AI Search is that we earlier thought to build a vector search and used to have the vector search query in Azure AI Search. Earlier, when it was a search service, we used to l...
What advice do you have for others considering Azure Search?
I can answer a few questions about Azure AI Search to share my opinion. I am still working with Azure and using Azure solutions. We haven't used Cognitive Skills in Azure AI Search. We also got a d...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
XOMNI, Real Madrid C.F., Weichert Realtors, JLL, NAV CANADA, Medihoo, autoTrader Corporation, Gjirafa
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Kendra vs. Azure AI Search and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.