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Elastic Search vs Faiss comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

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

Elastic Search
Ranking in Vector Databases
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
88
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (6th), Search as a Service (1st)
Faiss
Ranking in Vector Databases
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
3.3
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 4.0%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Faiss is 5.1%, down from 12.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Search4.0%
Faiss5.1%
Other90.9%
Vector Databases
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Kalindu Sekarage - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer
Integration improves accuracy and supports token-level embedding
The best features FAISS offers for my team include seamless integration with Colbert and the ability to use FAISS via the Ragatouille framework, which is tailor-made for using the Colbert model. Feature-wise, FAISS allows for more accurate result retrieval, and retrieval speed is also good when comparing the index size. Regarding features, I also emphasize that the usability of FAISS is very seamless, particularly its integration with Colbert and Ragatouille. FAISS has positively impacted my organization by helping us increase the accuracy of retrieval documents; when we store documents in token-level embedding, the accuracy will be high. Additionally, we do not need any external server to host FAISS, allowing us to integrate it with our backend framework, making it a very flexible framework.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Search is really powerful."
"All the quality features are there. There are about 60 to 70 reports available."
"The initial setup is very easy for small environments."
"The most valuable feature of Elasticsearch is its convenience in handling unstructured data."
"Elastic Enterprise Search is scalable. On a scale of one to 10, with one being not scalable and 10 being very scalable, I give Elastic Enterprise Search a 10."
"My favorite feature is the ease of use, particularly in how you integrate the agent; I've been using it since version 7, and we're on version 9 now, and I've seen the progress from using Beats to using the agent, making it so simple today to enroll a server with the Elastic Agent."
"Big businesses cannot survive without Elastic Search because it gives us very good visibility and handles our use cases very well."
"The products comes with REST APIs."
"I used Faiss as a basic database."
"The product has better performance and stability compared to one of its competitors."
 

Cons

"There should be more stability."
"It should be easier to use. It has been getting better because many functions are pre-defined, but it still needs improvement."
"The solution's integration and configuration are not easy. Not many people know exactly what to do."
"Elastic Enterprise Search could improve the report templates."
"New Relic could be more flexible, similar to Elasticsearch."
"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."
"They could improve some of the platform's infrastructure management capabilities."
"The price could be better. Kibana has some limitations in terms of the tablet to view event logs. I also have a high volume of data. On the initialization part, if you chose Kibana, you'll have some limitations. Kibana was primarily proposed as a log data reviewer to build applications to the viewer log data using Kibana. Then it became a virtualization tool, but it still has limitations from a developer's point of view."
"It could be more accessible for handling larger data sets."
"One of the drawbacks of Faiss is that it works only in-memory. If it could provide separate persistent storage without relying on in-memory, it would reduce the overhead."
"It would be beneficial if I could set a parameter and see different query mechanisms being run."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 tool is not expensive. Its licensing costs are yearly."
"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."
"It can move from $10,000 US Dollars per year to any price based on how powerful you need the searches to be and the capacity in terms of storage and process."
"I rate Elastic Search's pricing an eight out of ten."
"To access all the features available you require both the open source license and the production license."
"It can be expensive."
"The price of Elastic Enterprise is very, very competitive."
"Faiss is an open-source solution."
"It is an open-source tool."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

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

Questions from the Community

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...
What do you like most about Faiss?
I used Faiss as a basic database.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Faiss?
I did not purchase FAISS through the AWS Marketplace because FAISS is an open-source product. My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is straightforward, as there is no cost for acqui...
What needs improvement with Faiss?
I currently do not think there is anything to be improved based on our experience, as Faiss performs as we expected for our workflow. I would like to see improvement in the fact that FAISS currentl...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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.
1. Facebook 2. Airbnb 3. Pinterest 4. Twitter 5. Microsoft 6. Uber 7. LinkedIn 8. Netflix 9. Spotify 10. Adobe 11. eBay 12. Dropbox 13. Yelp 14. Salesforce 15. IBM 16. Intel 17. Nvidia 18. Qualcomm 19. Samsung 20. Sony 21. Tencent 22. Alibaba 23. Baidu 24. JD.com 25. Rakuten 26. Zillow 27. Booking.com 28. Expedia 29. TripAdvisor 30. Rakuten 31. Rakuten Viber 32. Rakuten Ichiba
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Search vs. Faiss and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.