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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 customer engagement was good."
"Offers a tremendous amount of flexibility and scalability when integrating with applications."
"The amount of flexibility and agility is really assuring."
"The search functionality time has been reduced to a few milliseconds."
"Creates indexers to get data from different data sources."
"The product is pretty resilient."
"The product is extremely configurable, allowing you to customize the search experience to suit your needs."
"It provides good access capabilities to various platforms."
"The observability is the best available because it provides granular insights that identify reasons for defects."
"I am impressed with the product's Logstash. The tool is fast and customizable. You can build beautiful dashboards with it. It is useful and reliable."
"The special text processing features in this solution are very important for me."
"The product is scalable with good performance."
"The search speed is most valuable and important."
"The most valuable feature is the out of the box Kibana."
"You have dashboards, it is visual, there are maps, you can create canvases. It's more visual than anything that I've ever used."
"There's lots of processing power. You can actually just add machines to get more performance if you need to. It's pretty flexible and very easy to add another log. It's not like 'oh, no, it's going to be so much extra data'. That's not a problem for the machine. It can handle it."
 

Cons

"For SDKs, Azure Search currently offers solutions for .NET and Python. Additional platforms would be welcomed, especially native iOS and Android solutions for mobile development."
"The after-hour services are slow."
"For availability, expanding its use to all Azure datacenters would be helpful in increasing awareness and usage of the product.​"
"The initial setup is not as easy as it should be."
"It would be good if the site found a better way to filter things based on subscription."
"Adding items to Azure Search using its .NET APIs sometimes throws exceptions."
"They should add an API for third-party vendors, like a security operating center or reporting system, that would be a big improvement."
"The solution's stability could be better."
"This product could be improved with additional security, and the addition of support for machine learning devices."
"Enterprise scaling of what have been essentially separate, free open source software (FOSS) products has been a challenge, but the folks at Elastic have published new add-ons (X-Pack and ECE) to help large companies grow ELK to required scales."
"Machine learning on search needs improvement."
"Dashboards could be more flexible, and it would be nice to provide more drill-down capabilities."
"There were also some difficult times with parallel and point-in-time interfaces, so better documentation could help, particularly more example-driven content."
"There are potential improvements based on our client feedback, like unifying the licensing cost structure."
"The documentation for Elastic Search can be challenging if you're not already familiar with the platform."
"New Relic could be more flexible, similar to Elasticsearch."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost is comparable."
"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, where one is the low price, and ten is the high price."
"The solution is affordable."
"​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 think the solution's pricing is ok compared to other cloud devices."
"For the actual costs, I encourage users to view the pricing page on the Azure site for details.​"
"We are paying $1,500 a month to use the solution. If you want to have endpoint protection you need to pay more."
"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 tool is not expensive. Its licensing costs are yearly."
"The tool is an open-source product."
"We are using the open-sourced version."
"The solution is less expensive than Stackdriver and Grafana."
"we are using a licensed version of the product."
"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."
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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.