Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Azure 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 Search
Ranking in Search as a Service
5th
Average Rating
7.4
Number of Reviews
8
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
67
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (9th), Vector Databases (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Azure Search is 14.6%, up from 13.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 14.4%, up from 8.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

Sandeep Srirangam - PeerSpot reviewer
Customer engagement & documentation about APIs are great, but it would be good if the UI is a bit more intuitive for search experience
I use the solution mainly to search the logs and to search for VMs by their names or subscription names. I wouldn't rate it great since the logs are a bit complicated The solution was really pretty good. The customer engagement was good. The presented documentation or exposure to the APIs to get…
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

"The amount of flexibility and agility is really assuring."
"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 product is pretty resilient."
"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."
"The customer engagement was good."
"We had many reasons to implement Elasticsearch for search term solutions. Elasticsearch products provide enterprise landscape support for different areas of the company."
"Helps us to store the data in key value pairs and, based on that, we can produce visualisations in 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."
"A good use case is saving metadata of your systems for data cataloging. Various systems, like those opened in metadata and similar applications, use Elasticsearch to store their text data."
"The solution has good security features. I have been happy with the dashboards and interface."
"The solution is valuable for log analytics."
"The AI-based attribute tagging is a valuable feature."
"The initial installation and setup were straightforward."
 

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 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."
"It would be good if the site found a better way to filter things based on subscription."
"The after-hour services are slow."
"The pricing is room for 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 is hard to learn and understand because it is a very big platform. This is the main reason why we still have nothing in production. We have to learn some things before we get there."
"The reports could improve."
"They could improve some of the platform's infrastructure management capabilities."
"There should be more stability."
"The metadata gets stored along with indexes and isn't queryable."
"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)."
"Its licensing needs to be improved. They don't offer a perpetual license. They want to know how many nodes you will be using, and they ask for an annual subscription. Otherwise, they don't give you permission to use it. Our customers are generally military or police departments or customers without connection to the internet. Therefore, this model is not suitable for us. This subscription-based model is not the best for OEM vendors. Another annoying thing about Elasticsearch is its roadmap. We are developing something, and then they say, "Okay. We have removed that feature in this release," and when we are adapting to that release, they say, "Okay. We have removed that one as well." We don't know what they will remove in the next version. They are not looking for backward compatibility from the customers' perspective. They just remove a feature and say, "Okay. We've removed this one." In terms of new features, it should have an ODBC driver so that you can search and integrate this product with existing BI tools and reporting tools. Currently, you need to go for third parties, such as CData, in order to achieve this. ODBC driver is the most important feature required. Its Community Edition does not have security features. For example, you cannot authenticate with a username and password. It should have security features. They might have put it in the latest release."
"They should improve its documentation. Their official documentation is not very informative. They can also improve their technical support. They don't help you much with the customized stuff. They also need to add more visuals. Currently, they have line charts, bar charts, and things like that, and they can add more types of visuals. They should also improve the alerts. They are not very simple to use and are a bit complex. They could add more options to the alerting system."
 

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 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.​"
"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."
"We use the free version for some logs, but not extensive use."
"The tool is not expensive. Its licensing costs are yearly."
"It can be expensive."
"We are paying $1,500 a month to use the solution. If you want to have endpoint protection you need to pay more."
"We are using the free open-sourced version of this solution."
"The price of Elastic Enterprise is very, very competitive."
"Elastic Search is open-source, but you need to pay for support, which is expensive."
"This product is open-source and can be used free of charge."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Search as a Service solutions are best for your needs.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
24%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
7%
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Azure Search?
The after-hour services are slow. It could be better.
What is your primary use case for Azure Search?
We use the solution to link the Active Directory account to Office 365.
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

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 Search vs. Elastic Search and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.