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Azure AI Search 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

Azure AI Search
Ranking in Search as a Service
4th
Average Rating
7.4
Number of Reviews
9
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 (6th), Vector Databases (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Azure AI Search is 9.0%, down from 14.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 18.5%, up from 13.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Search18.5%
Azure AI Search9.0%
Other72.5%
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

Prabakaran SP - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Architect at a financial services firm with 1-10 employees
Automated indexing has streamlined document search workflows but semantic relevance and setup complexity still need improvement
We used the semantic search capabilities of Azure AI Search, but we haven't gotten good results in the semantic search. So we are exploring with ChromaDB, and Cosmos is having the capability of doing the semantic search as well. We are exploring that. A few queries we use analytics search, which works and is good. Analytics search is good. We are trying the ML capabilities of the product since we are using Databricks and other tools for building the models, MLflow, and related items. We are still working on proof of concepts, which could be better with ChromaDB or Cosmos or vector search or inbuilt Databricks vector stores. Language processing is not about user intention; it's about the context. If there is a document and you want to know the context of a particular section, then we would use vector search. Instead of traversing through the whole document, while chunking it into the vector, we'll categorize and chunk, and then we'll look only at those chunks to do a semantic search. When comparing Azure AI Search, I'm doing a proof of concept because with ChromaDB I can create instances using LangChain anywhere. For per session, I can create one ChromaDB and can remove it, which is really useful for proof of concepts. Instead of creating an Azure AI Search instance and doing that there, that is one advantage I'm seeing for the proof of concept alone, not for the entire product. I hope it should support all the embedding providers as well. Is there a viewer or tool similar to Storage Explorer? We are basically SQL-centric people, so we used to find Cosmos DB very quick for us when we search something and create indexes. I guess there is some limitation in Azure AI Search. I couldn't remember now, such as querying limitations. I'm not remembering that part.
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

"The search functionality time has been reduced to a few milliseconds."
"Offers a tremendous amount of flexibility and scalability when integrating with applications."
"Because all communication is done via the REST API, data is retrieved quickly in JSON format to reduce overhead and latency.​"
"The solution's initial setup is straightforward."
"Azure Search is well-documented, making it easy to understand and implement."
"The product is pretty resilient."
"Creates indexers to get data from different data sources."
"The product is extremely configurable, allowing you to customize the search experience to suit your needs."
"Elastic Search is the perfect tool for scalability."
"The solution offers good stability."
"The AI-based attribute tagging is a valuable feature."
"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 analytics with Elastic benefits us due to the huge traffic volume in our organization, which reaches up to 60,000 requests per second. With logs of approximately 25 GB per day, manually analyzing traffic behavior, payloads, headers, user agents, and other details is impractical."
"Using real-time search functionality to support operational decisions has been helpful."
"It is stable."
"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."
"I value the feature that allows me to share the dashboards to different people with different levels of access."
 

Cons

"The initial setup is not as easy as it should be."
"They should add an API for third-party vendors, like a security operating center or reporting system, that would be a big improvement."
"Adding items to Azure Search using its .NET APIs sometimes throws exceptions."
"For availability, expanding its use to all Azure datacenters would be helpful in increasing awareness and usage of the product.​"
"It would be good if the site found a better way to filter things based on subscription."
"The solution's stability could be better."
"The after-hour services are slow."
"The pricing is room for improvement."
"Improving machine learning capabilities would be beneficial."
"Technical support should be faster."
"I would rate technical support from Elastic Search as three out of ten. The main issue is a general sum of all factors."
"The different applications need to be individually deployed."
"I found an issue with Elasticsearch in terms of aggregation. They are good, yet the rules written for this are not really good."
"There are potential improvements based on our client feedback, like unifying the licensing cost structure."
"The documentation regarding customization could be better."
"The upgrade experience and inflexibility with fields keeps Elastic Search from being a perfect 10."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"​When telling people about the product, I always encourage them to set up a new service using the free pricing tier. This allows them to learn about the product and its capabilities in a risk-free environment. Depending on their needs, the free tier may be suitable for their projects, however enterprise applications will most likely required a higher, paid tier."
"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, where one is the low price, and ten is the high price."
"The cost is comparable."
"I think the solution's pricing is ok compared to other cloud devices."
"The solution is affordable."
"For the actual costs, I encourage users to view the pricing page on the Azure site for details.​"
"The basic license is free, but it comes with a lot of features that aren't free. With a gold license, we get active directory integration. With a platinum license, we get alerting."
"The pricing structure depends on the scalability steps."
"There is a free version, and there is also a hosted version for which you have to pay. We're currently using the free version. If things go well, we might go for the paid version."
"It can be expensive."
"The tool is an open-source product."
"To access all the features available you require both the open source license and the production license."
"The pricing model is questionable and needs to be addressed because when you would like to have the security they charge per machine."
"ELK has been considered as an alternative to Splunk to reduce licensing costs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Retailer
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise43
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Azure Search?
We used the semantic search capabilities of Azure AI Search, but we haven't gotten good results in the semantic search. So we are exploring with ChromaDB, and Cosmos is having the capability of doi...
What is your primary use case for Azure Search?
Our use case for Azure AI Search is that we earlier thought to build a vector search and used to have the vector search query in Azure AI Search. Earlier, when it was a search service, we used to l...
What advice do you have for others considering Azure Search?
I can answer a few questions about Azure AI Search to share my opinion. I am still working with Azure and using Azure solutions. We haven't used Cognitive Skills in Azure AI Search. We also got a d...
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?
Elastic Search's pricing totally depends on the server. Managed services from AWS are used, and we have worked on a self-managed Elastic Search cluster. On the AWS side, it is very expensive becaus...
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
To be honest, there is only one downside of Elastic Search that makes sense because we use a basic license, which is a free license. We do not have some features available because of the free licen...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

XOMNI, Real Madrid C.F., Weichert Realtors, JLL, NAV CANADA, Medihoo, autoTrader Corporation, Gjirafa
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 Azure AI Search vs. Elastic Search and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.