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AWS Glue vs Elastic Search comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 3, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.9
AWS Glue delivers cost-effective efficiency, reducing setup costs and time while providing favorable ROI for limited pipeline needs.
Sentiment score
6.4
Elastic Search improves efficiency and insights, offering 50% ROI despite cost concerns due to its stability and open-source benefits.
I advocate using Glue in such cases.
We have not purchased any licensed products, and our use of Elastic Search is purely open-source, contributing positively to our ROI.
It is stable, and we do not encounter critical issues like server downtime, which could result in data loss.
The main benefits observed from using Elastic Search include improvements in operational efficiency, along with cost, time, and resource savings.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.8
AWS Glue users appreciate technical support for its reliability and helpfulness, but desire improvements in response consistency and fees.
Sentiment score
6.6
Elastic Search support is knowledgeable but slow; extensive documentation and community resources often suffice for user independence.
Upgrades occur every four months, and new developments coincide with version updates.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.0
AWS Glue offers seamless, scalable data handling with serverless architecture, though some see potential for resource management improvements.
Sentiment score
7.3
Elastic Search offers strong scalability, praised for ease of use, though rapid scaling and large data pose challenges.
It is beneficial to upgrade jobs, and we conduct extensive testing in development before migrating to production.
It can easily handle data from one terabyte to 100 terabytes or more, scaling nicely with larger datasets.
I would rate its scalability a ten.
I can actually add more storage and memory because I host it in the cloud.
I would rate the scalability of Elasticsearch as an eight.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.0
AWS Glue is highly reliable, seamlessly integrates with AWS, and benefits from serverless architecture, managed support, and easy troubleshooting.
Sentiment score
7.7
Elastic Search is considered stable and reliable, though issues with memory and resource management can affect performance.
AWS Glue is highly stable, and I would rate its stability as nine.
The data transfer sometimes exceeded the bandwidth limits without proper notification, which caused issues.
The stability of Elasticsearch was very high.
 

Room For Improvement

AWS Glue users seek quicker start-up, better UI, Java support, multi-cloud compatibility, cost reduction, and improved documentation and support.
Enhancements in security, support, scalability, integration, and user experience are needed for improved Elastic Search efficiency and usability.
Migrating jobs from version 3.0 to 4.0 can present compatibility issues.
With AWS, I gather data from multiple sources, clean it up, normalize it, de-duplicate it, and make it presentable.
A more user-friendly and simpler process would help speed up the deployment process.
This can create problems for new developers because they have to quickly switch to another version.
It is primarily based on Unix or Linux-based operating systems and cannot be easily configured in Windows systems.
The consistency and stability of Elasticsearch are commendable, and they should keep up the good work.
 

Setup Cost

AWS Glue offers flexible pay-as-you-go pricing, affordable yet costly for smaller firms, with extra costs for technical support.
Elastic Search's base functionality is free, but enterprise features require licenses, making larger deployments potentially costly.
Costing depends on resource usage, and cost optimization may involve redesigning jobs for flexibility.
AWS charges based on runtime, which can be quite pricey.
The smallest cost for a project is around €700, while the largest can reach up to €7,000 based on the scale of the usage.
We used the open-source version of Elasticsearch, which was free.
 

Valuable Features

AWS Glue features a user-friendly, scalable interface, ensuring seamless integration, effective ETL tasks, and cost-effective data transformation.
Elastic Search excels in scalable data management, rapid search, AI-based analytics, with Kibana enhancing visualization and multitenancy.
For ETL, I feel the performance is excellent. If I create jobs in a standard way, the performance is great, and maintenance is also seamless.
AWS Glue's most valuable features include its transformation capabilities, which provide data quality and shape for processing in ML or AI models.
I think if I'm working with big data, common languages like Python work quite nicely, which is advantageous.
Elastic Search makes handling large data volumes efficient and supports complex search operations.
The most valuable feature of Elasticsearch was the quick search capability, allowing us to search by any criteria needed.
Aggregation is faster than querying directly from a database, like Postgres or Vertica.
 

Categories and Ranking

AWS Glue
Ranking in Cloud Data Integration
1st
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
49
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Elastic Search
Ranking in Cloud Data Integration
11th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
70
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Search as a Service (1st), Vector Databases (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Cloud Data Integration category, the mindshare of AWS Glue is 20.5%, down from 21.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 2.1%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

Saurabh Jaiswal - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables seamless integration and data preparation with robust transformation capabilities
AWS Glue's most valuable features include its transformation capabilities, which provide data quality and shape for processing in ML or AI models. It offers transformation options on canvas or through ETL pipelines, notebooks, and code. Additionally, it supports data preparation, cleaning, and filtering seamlessly. AWS Glue also enhances job scheduling and orchestration capabilities, integrating with AWS Glue Studio for comprehensive data workflow management.
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.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How do you select the right cloud ETL tool?
AWS Glue and Azure Data factory for ELT best performance cloud services.
How does Talend Open Studio compare with AWS Glue?
We reviewed AWS Glue before choosing Talend Open Studio. AWS Glue is the managed ETL (extract, transform, and load) from Amazon Web Services. AWS Glue enables AWS users to create and manage jobs in...
What are the most common use cases for AWS Glue?
AWS Glue's main use case is for allowing users to discover, prepare, move, and integrate data from multiple sources. The product lets you use this data for analytics, application development, or ma...
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

bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday
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 AWS Glue vs. Elastic Search and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
851,491 professionals have used our research since 2012.