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Amazon Kendra vs Azure AI Search comparison

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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
4th
Average Rating
7.6
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon Kendra is 6.3%, down from 8.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Azure AI Search is 12.8%, up from 9.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Azure AI Search12.8%
Amazon Kendra6.3%
Other80.9%
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.
Harshal Chandekar - PeerSpot reviewer
AI Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Rag workflows have improved document search and reduced development effort for client projects
In my experience, the best features Azure AI Search offers are that it is very easy to upload documents and they can obviously be very agile and we can query upon these documents very easily. When I say it is easy to upload and query documents, it makes the application more reliable in the case that if we have a certain study or certain use case wherein just that PDF or just those amount of information will be used and not the entire thing, so the user can just go quickly and search for that documentation. I think it is fully integrated with Azure and we use Azure primarily for our primary cloud platform, so that helps very much in integrating and in maintaining one service provider. Regarding Azure AI Search's AI capabilities, it provides good security in terms of reliability and scalability as well, so there are no concerns for it regarding those issues. Regarding Azure AI Search's AI capabilities, it is accurate and reliable 99% of the time.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Provides flexibility to tune the relevance and ranking of results."
"Until recently, there wasn't an out-of-the-box service in the market for enterprise documents like Kendra."
"We have good use cases where stability is everything. So it's a stable solution."
"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."
"Because all communication is done via the REST API, data is retrieved quickly in JSON format to reduce overhead and latency.​"
"Azure Search is well-documented, making it easy to understand and implement."
"It provides good access capabilities to various platforms."
"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."
"By implementing Azure Search, I have been able to create immersive, feature-rich search experiences for my applications that feature helpful facets, in-line highlighting, and predictive results as user types."
"Offers a tremendous amount of flexibility and scalability when integrating with applications."
 

Cons

"There are some token limits."
"This is a really, really expensive solution making the adoption of it very difficult at the enterprise level."
"The time it takes for indexing documents could be reduced."
"They should add an API for third-party vendors, like a security operating center or reporting system, that would be a big improvement."
"For availability, expanding its use to all Azure datacenters would be helpful in increasing awareness and usage of the product.​"
"The solution's stability could be better."
"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."
"We used the semantic search capabilities of Azure AI Search, but we haven't gotten good results in the semantic search."
"The initial setup is not as easy as it should be."
"It would be good if the site found a better way to filter things based on subscription."
"Adding items to Azure Search using its .NET APIs sometimes throws exceptions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing falls in the medium range."
"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, where one is the low price, and ten is the high price."
"The cost is comparable."
"I think the solution's pricing is ok compared to other cloud devices."
"The solution is affordable."
"For the actual costs, I encourage users to view the pricing page on the Azure site for details.​"
"​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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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What needs improvement with Azure Search?
I think Azure AI Search can be improved by implementing it with the agents as well, and I think that their agent integration is something they could work upon or they can improve it very easily or ...
What is your primary use case for Azure Search?
My main use case for Azure AI Search is building RAG workflows which are useful for client work. I used Azure AI Search in finding documents about a user manual in which the problem statement was i...
What advice do you have for others considering Azure Search?
On a scale of 1 to 10, I rate Azure AI Search a nine. I chose a nine for Azure AI Search primarily because of the agents and the use cases are very limited, I would say to RAG as of now. Azure AI S...
 

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: September 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.