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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
5th
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
88
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (5th), Vector Databases (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon Kendra is 6.5%, down from 17.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 18.3%, up from 14.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Search18.3%
Amazon Kendra6.5%
Other75.2%
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.
Vaibhav Shukla - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at Agoda
Search performance has transformed large-scale intent discovery and hybrid query handling
While Elastic Search is a good product, I see areas for improvement, particularly regarding the misconception that any amount of data can simply be dumped into Elastic Search. When creating an index, careful consideration of data massaging is essential. Elastic Search stores mappings for various data types, which must remain below a certain threshold to maintain functionality. Users need to throttle the number of fields for searching to avoid overloading the system and ensure that the design of the document is efficient for the Elastic Search index. Additionally, I suggest utilizing ILM periodically throughout the year to manage data shuffling between clusters, preventing hotspots in the distribution of requests across nodes.

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."
"We have good use cases where stability is everything. So it's a stable solution."
"Decision-making has become much faster due to real-time data and quick responses."
"Helps us to store the data in key value pairs and, based on that, we can produce visualisations in Kibana."
"The most valuable features are the data store and the X-pack extension."
"Elastic Search has impacted my organization positively as we use it for logging and APM."
"It is easy to scale with the cluster node model.​"
"I would recommend Elastic Search to other people who want to have fast search in their applications."
"X-Pack provides good features, like authorization and alerts."
"Search is really powerful."
 

Cons

"There are some token limits."
"The time it takes for indexing documents could be reduced."
"The real-time search functionality is not operational due to its impact on system resources."
"The most significant issue I find with Elastic Search is that it gets out of sync, and this has happened in both cases where I have implemented it."
"Pagination in Elastic Search is very slow."
"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 are potential improvements based on our client feedback, like unifying the licensing cost structure."
"There is a lack of technical people to develop, implement and optimize equipment operation and web queries."
"It was not possible to use authentication three years back. You needed to buy the product's services for authentication."
"It should be easier to use. It has been getting better because many functions are pre-defined, but it still needs improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing falls in the medium range."
"The solution is affordable."
"The pricing structure depends on the scalability steps."
"Elastic Search is open-source, but you need to pay for support, which is expensive."
"We are using the open-sourced version."
"I rate Elastic Search's pricing an eight out of ten."
"​The pricing and license model are clear: node-based model."
"The pricing model is questionable and needs to be addressed because when you would like to have the security they charge per machine."
"The solution is less expensive than Stackdriver and Grafana."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Retailer
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise43
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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?
On the subject of pricing, Elastic Search is very cost-efficient. You can host it on-premises, which would incur zero cost, or take it as a SaaS-based service, where the expenses remain minimal.
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
While Elastic Search is a good product, I see areas for improvement, particularly regarding the misconception that any amount of data can simply be dumped into Elastic Search. When creating an inde...
 

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: February 2026.
881,733 professionals have used our research since 2012.