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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 (8th), Vector Databases (6th)
 

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 Elastic Search is 15.3%, down from 18.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Elastic Search15.3%
Amazon Kendra6.3%
Other78.4%
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

"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."
"Provides flexibility to tune the relevance and ranking of results."
"The solution is quite scalable and this is one of its advantages."
"A positive feature of ELK is that it directly interacts with Elasticsearch, the UI is very nice, and performance wise it's quite good too."
"Elastic Search is very user-friendly, and we can easily integrate it with third-party models and other AWS S3 buckets."
"The observability is the best available because it provides granular insights that identify reasons for defects."
"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."
"Elastic Search's main advantages are the visuals that represent and visualize all entities and system components in a simplified diagram, which provides the ability to identify which component in the system has an issue."
"Elastic Enterprise Search is a nonstructured database that can manage large amounts of nonstructured data."
"I appreciate the indexing capabilities and the speed of indexing in their product, which demonstrates how quickly logs are collected and stored."
 

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."
"I have not explored Elastic Search at the most. Searching from vector DB is available in Elastic Search, and there is one more concept of graph searching or graph database searching. I have not explored it, but if it is not there, that would be an improvement area where Elastic Search can improve."
"It should be easier to use. It has been getting better because many functions are pre-defined, but it still needs improvement."
"The deployment was a struggle as I faced challenges with bash commands and understanding how to run things on my system."
"Better dashboards or a better configuration system would be very good."
"Elastic Search has limitations for handling huge amounts of data and updates, especially if updates are frequent."
"We'd like to see more integration in the future, especially around service desks or other ITSM tools."
"There are some features and functionality that could be enhanced in Elastic Search to improve its overall capabilities."
"Elastic Search is stable and reliable until you build the cluster for one terabyte."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing falls in the medium range."
"The price could be better."
"The tool is not expensive. Its licensing costs are yearly."
"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 price of Elasticsearch is fair. It is a more expensive solution, like QRadar. The price for Elasticsearch is not much more than other solutions we have."
"We are using the open-sourced version."
"The price of Elastic Enterprise is very, very competitive."
"The tool is an open-source product."
"​The pricing and license model are clear: node-based model."
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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%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

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.
920,929 professionals have used our research since 2012.