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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
4th
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
72
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (10th), Vector Databases (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon Kendra is 11.3%, down from 21.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 18.6%, up from 9.3% 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."
"It is stable."
"The forced merge and forced resonate features reduce the data size increasing reliability."
"I appreciate the indexing capabilities and the speed of indexing in their product, which demonstrates how quickly logs are collected and stored."
"The solution is quite scalable and this is one of its advantages."
"The AI-based attribute tagging is a valuable feature."
"The solution has good security features. I have been happy with the dashboards and interface."
"The security portion of Elasticsearch is particularly beneficial, allowing me to view and analyze security alerts."
"It is a stable and good platform."
 

Cons

"The time it takes for indexing documents could be reduced."
"There are some token limits."
"The pricing of this product needs to be more clear because I cannot understand it when I review the website."
"There are some features lacking in ELK Elasticsearch."
"I would rate the stability a seven out of ten. We faced a few issues."
"It needs email notification, similar to what Logentries has. Because of the notification issue, we moved to Logentries, as it provides a simple way to receive notification whenever a server encounters an error or unexpected conditions (which we have defined using RegEx​)."
"Elasticsearch could improve by honoring Unix environmental variables and not relying only on those provided by Java (e.g. installing plugins over the Unix http proxy)."
"The reports could improve."
"They could improve some of the platform's infrastructure management capabilities."
"We'd like more user-friendly integrations."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing falls in the medium range."
"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."
"The pricing structure depends on the scalability steps."
"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."
"We are paying $1,500 a month to use the solution. If you want to have endpoint protection you need to pay more."
"Elastic Search is open-source, but you need to pay for support, which is expensive."
"The premium license is expensive."
"An X-Pack license is more affordable than Splunk."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Retailer
8%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
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?
We used the open-source version of Elasticsearch, which was free.
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
It would be useful if a feature for renaming indices could be added without affecting the performance of other features. However, overall, the consistency and stability of Elasticsearch are already...
 

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: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.