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Amazon Kendra vs Elastic Search comparison

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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 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
Elastic Search
Ranking in Search as a Service
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
100
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (5th), Vector Databases (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon Kendra is 6.2%, down from 9.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 15.7%, down from 19.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Elastic Search15.7%
Amazon Kendra6.2%
Other78.1%
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.
reviewer2817942 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Logging and vector search have transformed observability and empowered reliable ai agents
Elastic Search is not specifically being used for certain purposes. I deploy Elastic Search database on the cloud and use cloud services so that nobody can attack. However, I do not use Elastic Search to resolve attack issues. The basic main purpose of Elastic Search, as of now, I feel it can do more in the AI area. Sometime I saw that when I am developing RAG and have to generate the embeddings, which I call metadata, sometimes it tries to fail. That durability or issue handling should be improved, but apart from that, I did not find anything as of now. As per my use case, whatever I am using seems pretty good. Apart from that, some definitely improvement will be there. One improvement is that it should be faster. Whenever I am searching any logs, it takes much time. For example, if I open my log in Notepad or a similar tool, I can search the text within a second. With Elastic Search, it takes a little bit of time, ten to fifteen seconds. That can be improved. Sometimes, engineers take time to assign when I create a ticket.

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."
"There are a lot of good things about this solution. First, it is an extremely fast search. We have quite an extensive number of logs, and we can search through billions of documents in just a few minutes, and get the results we're looking for."
"Elastic Search is very user-friendly, and we can easily integrate it with third-party models and other AWS S3 buckets."
"The pricing and license model are clear: node-based model."
"The machine learning features of Elastic Search are very interesting, including the possibility to include models such as ELSER and different multilingual models that let us fine-tune our searches and use them in our search projects."
"It gives us the possibility to store and query this data and also do this efficiently and securely and without delays."
"In the last 18 months Elastic has really caught up and also gone way beyond AWS by putting together all the missing components that make ELK Elasticsearch the most comprehensive stack in the entire Big Data ecosystem."
"Elastic Search has impacted my organization positively as we use it for logging and APM."
"The most valuable feature for us is the analytics that we can configure and view using Kibana."
 

Cons

"The time it takes for indexing documents could be reduced."
"There are some token limits."
"This is a really, really expensive solution making the adoption of it very difficult at the enterprise level."
"Scalability of Elastic Search presents disadvantages, particularly when handling minimal or production-level data."
"Elastic Search needs to improve authentication. It also needs to work on the Kibana visualization dashboard."
"The solution has quite a steep learning curve. The usability and general user-friendliness could be improved. However, that is kind of typical with products that have a lot of flexibility, or a lot of capabilities. Sometimes having more choices makes things more complex. It makes it difficult to configure it, though. It's kind of a bitter pill that you have to swallow in the beginning and you really have to get through it."
"I would like to see more open source tools and testing as well as a signature analysis in the solution."
"I think the first area for improvement is pricing, as the cluster cost for Elastic Search is too high for me."
"Dashboards could be more flexible, and it would be nice to provide more drill-down capabilities."
"Elastic needs to work on their Machine Learning offering because currently they have been trying to make it a black box which doesn't work for a serious user (a Data Scientist) as it doesn't give any control over the underlying algorithm."
"There are challenges with performance management and scalability."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing falls in the medium range."
"I rate Elastic Search's pricing an eight out of ten."
"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."
"There is a free version, and there is also a hosted version for which you have to pay. We're currently using the free version. If things go well, we might go for the paid version."
"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."
"This is a free, open source software (FOSS) tool, which means no cost on the front-end. There are no free lunches in this world though. Technical skill to implement and support are costly on the back-end with ELK, whether you train/hire internally or go for premium services from Elastic."
"The pricing model is questionable and needs to be addressed because when you would like to have the security they charge per machine."
"We are using the free version and intend to upgrade."
"An X-Pack license is more affordable than Splunk."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business40
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise50
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ELK Elasticsearch?
The pricing for Elastic Search is mainly budgeted according to the organization budget, so we take it as a yearly subscription, and that is acceptable since we do get a fair discount when we are ta...
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
When we get the logs, it is mostly about how we edit the configurations and how we make changes according to the requirements of our organization. In these cases, the logs sometimes can be a bit in...
What is your primary use case for ELK Elasticsearch?
I am the Elastic Search admin for my organization, and we are using Elastic Search to handle the traffic to GCP. The monitoring of all the clusters and all the deployments are quite good, and compa...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
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 Kendra vs. Elastic Search and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,924 professionals have used our research since 2012.