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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
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
72
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (10th), 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 (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 4.7%, down from 6.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Faiss is 5.9%, down from 15.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Kalindu Sekarage - PeerSpot reviewer
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

"I really like the visualization that you can do within it. That's really handy. Product-wise, it is a very good and stable product."
"The most valuable features are the detection and correlation features."
"Elastic Search is very quick when handling a large volume of data."
"Elasticsearch includes a graphical user interface (GUI) called Kibana. The GUI features are extremely beneficial to us."
"The initial setup is very easy for small environments."
"Overall, considering key aspects like cost, learning curve, and data indexing architecture, Elasticsearch is a very good tool."
"The most valuable feature of Elastic Enterprise Search is user behavior analysis."
"It provides deep visibility into your cloud and distributed applications, from microservices to serverless architectures. It quickly identifies and resolves the root causes of issues, like gaining visibility into all the cloud-based and on-prem applications."
"The product has better performance and stability compared to one of its competitors."
"I used Faiss as a basic database."
 

Cons

"Machine learning on search needs improvement."
"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."
"There are potential improvements based on our client feedback, like unifying the licensing cost structure."
"There is a lack of technical people to develop, implement and optimize equipment operation and web queries."
"Elasticsearch should have simpler commands for window filtering."
"Elastic Enterprise Search can improve by adding some kind of search that can be used out of the box without too much struggle with configuration. With every kind of search engine, there is some kind of special function that you need to do. A simple out-of-the-box search would be useful."
"I have not been using the solution for many years to know exactly the improvements needed. However, they could simplify how the YML files have to be structured properly."
"There are a lot of manual steps on the operating system. It could be simplified in the user interface."
"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."
"It could be more accessible for handling larger data sets."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The premium license is expensive."
"This product is open-source and can be used free of charge."
"The pricing model is questionable and needs to be addressed because when you would like to have the security they charge per machine."
"The pricing structure depends on the scalability steps."
"ELK has been considered as an alternative to Splunk to reduce licensing costs."
"The price could be better."
"We use the free version for some logs, but not extensive use."
"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."
"It is an open-source tool."
"Faiss is an open-source solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
University
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
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?
We used the open-source version of Elasticsearch, which was free.
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
It would be useful if a feature for renaming indices could be added without affecting the performance of other features. However, overall, the consistency and stability of Elasticsearch are already...
What do you like most about Faiss?
I used Faiss as a basic database.
What needs improvement with Faiss?
I didn't know what algorithm was being learned to fetch my query. It would be beneficial if I could set a parameter and see different query mechanisms being run. I can then compare the results to s...
 

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: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.