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Amazon Kendra 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 Kendra
Ranking in Search as a Service
2nd
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
6.7
Number of Reviews
67
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (9th), Vector Databases (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon Kendra is 16.6%, down from 22.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 14.4%, up from 8.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

AM
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.
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

"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."
"Elastic Enterprise Search is scalable. On a scale of one to 10, with one being not scalable and 10 being very scalable, I give Elastic Enterprise Search a 10."
"The most valuable feature of Elastic Enterprise Search is the Discovery option for the visualization of logs on a GPU instead of on the server."
"Gives us a more user-friendly, centralized solution (for those who just needed a quick glance, without being masters of sed and awk) as well as the ability to implement various mechanisms for machine-learning from our logs, and sending alerts for anomalies."
"It provides deep visibility into your cloud and distributed applications, from microservices to serverless architectures. It quickly identifies and resolves the root causes of issues, like gaining visibility into all the cloud-based and on-prem applications."
"It is highly valuable because of its simplicity in maintenance, where most tasks are handled for you, and it offers a plethora of built-in features."
"We had many reasons to implement Elasticsearch for search term solutions. Elasticsearch products provide enterprise landscape support for different areas of the company."
"X-Pack provides good features, like authorization and alerts."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its utility and usefulness."
 

Cons

"The time it takes for indexing documents could be reduced."
"There are some token limits."
"While integrating with tools like agents for ingesting data from sources like firewalls is valuable, I believe prioritizing improvements to the core product would be more beneficial."
"There is another solution I'm testing which has a 500 record limit when you do a search on Elastic Enterprise Search. That's the only area in which I'm not sure whether it's a limitation on our end in terms of knowledge or a technical limitation from Elastic Enterprise Search. There is another solution we are looking at that rides on Elastic Enterprise Search. And the limit is for any sort of records that you're doing or data analysis you're trying to do, you can only extract 500 records at a time. I know the open-source nature has a lot of limitations, Otherwise, Elastic Enterprise Search is a fantastic solution and I'd recommend it to anyone."
"I would rate the stability a seven out of ten. We faced a few issues."
"I would like to see more integration for the solution with different platforms."
"Elastic Search needs to improve its technical support. It should be customer-friendly and have good support."
"Ratio aggregation is not supported in this solution."
"The documentation regarding customization could be better."
"Both the graph feature and the reporting feature are a little bit lacking. The alerting also needs to be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing falls in the medium range."
"The tool is not expensive. Its licensing costs are yearly."
"We are using the free open-sourced version of this solution."
"ELK has been considered as an alternative to Splunk to reduce licensing costs."
"Although the ELK Elasticsearch software is open-source, we buy the hardware."
"The premium license is expensive."
"It can move from $10,000 US Dollars per year to any price based on how powerful you need the searches to be and the capacity in terms of storage and process."
"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 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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon Kendra?
We have good use cases where stability is everything. So it's a stable solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Kendra?
The pricing falls in the medium range. The cost depends on the size of your use case because it has a fixed cost, not a variable. The licensing is on a monthly basis. There are no extra costs. Only...
What needs improvement with Amazon Kendra?
There are some token limits. We cannot ask questions with more than 30 tokens. Access cannot be more than 200 tokens. And the token is also, like, one point. Then views are very hard limits, and it...
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?
I don't know about pricing. That is dealt with by the sales team and our account team. I was not involved with that.
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
I found an issue with Elasticsearch in terms of aggregation. They are good, yet the rules written for this are not really good. There is a maximum of 10,000 entries, so the limitation means that if...
 

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: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.