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Elastic Search vs Faiss comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

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
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
100
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (8th), Search as a Service (1st)
Faiss
Ranking in Vector Databases
15th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
3.3
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 5.5%, up from 4.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Faiss is 4.3%, down from 5.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Elastic Search5.5%
Faiss4.3%
Other90.2%
Vector Databases
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2817942 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Logging and vector search have transformed observability and empowered reliable ai agents
Elastic Search is not specifically being used for certain purposes. I deploy Elastic Search database on the cloud and use cloud services so that nobody can attack. However, I do not use Elastic Search to resolve attack issues. The basic main purpose of Elastic Search, as of now, I feel it can do more in the AI area. Sometime I saw that when I am developing RAG and have to generate the embeddings, which I call metadata, sometimes it tries to fail. That durability or issue handling should be improved, but apart from that, I did not find anything as of now. As per my use case, whatever I am using seems pretty good. Apart from that, some definitely improvement will be there. One improvement is that it should be faster. Whenever I am searching any logs, it takes much time. For example, if I open my log in Notepad or a similar tool, I can search the text within a second. With Elastic Search, it takes a little bit of time, ten to fifteen seconds. That can be improved. Sometimes, engineers take time to assign when I create a ticket.
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

"ELK Elasticsearch is a product that I recommend."
"This is a very rich product, and it's got a very wide functionality, and a wide range of functionalities which I don't see in the other products, especially not in the cheaper ones."
"In summary, Elasticsearch is a very useful product that I can quickly recommend."
"Elastic Search makes handling large data volumes efficient and supports complex search operations."
"The solution has a lot of features; they have machine learning jobs they can implement, I'm not there yet, but I can use anomaly detection to see there are various processes that can find users that aren't supposed to log onto certain machines."
"The tool's stability and performance are good."
"The AI-based attribute tagging is a valuable feature."
"You have dashboards, it is visual, there are maps, you can create canvases. It's more visual than anything that I've ever used."
"I used Faiss as a basic database."
"The product has better performance and stability compared to one of its competitors."
 

Cons

"Regarding what I dislike about Elastic Search, there is one issue that occurs because Elastic Search is not my primary database; it serves as a substitute database for the searching part."
"What they need is to be more transparent about the actual setup of the cluster and the deployment process."
"The solution's integration and configuration are not easy. Not many people know exactly what to do."
"Apart from the good things, what I would like to see improved or enhanced in Elastic Search is the storage cost."
"The pricing of this product needs to be more clear because I cannot understand it when I review the website."
"The solution must provide AI integrations."
"Both the graph feature and the reporting feature are a little bit lacking. The alerting also needs to be improved."
"The solution has quite a steep learning curve. The usability and general user-friendliness could be improved. However, that is kind of typical with products that have a lot of flexibility, or a lot of capabilities. Sometimes having more choices makes things more complex. It makes it difficult to configure it, though. It's kind of a bitter pill that you have to swallow in the beginning and you really have to get through it."
"It would be beneficial if I could set a parameter and see different query mechanisms being run."
"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 could be more accessible for handling larger data sets."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is affordable."
"The pricing structure depends on the scalability steps."
"We are using the free open-sourced version of this solution."
"The tool is not expensive. Its licensing costs are yearly."
"The tool is an open-source product."
"ELK has been considered as an alternative to Splunk to reduce licensing costs."
"The price of Elastic Enterprise is very, very competitive."
"we are using a licensed version of the product."
"It is an open-source tool."
"Faiss is an open-source solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business40
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise50
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ELK Elasticsearch?
The pricing for Elastic Search is mainly budgeted according to the organization budget, so we take it as a yearly subscription, and that is acceptable since we do get a fair discount when we are ta...
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
When we get the logs, it is mostly about how we edit the configurations and how we make changes according to the requirements of our organization. In these cases, the logs sometimes can be a bit in...
What is your primary use case for ELK Elasticsearch?
I am the Elastic Search admin for my organization, and we are using Elastic Search to handle the traffic to GCP. The monitoring of all the clusters and all the deployments are quite good, and compa...
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...
What is your primary use case for Faiss?
My main use case for FAISS is in a retrieval-augmented generation project using it with OpenAI, where we use FAISS to store our embeddings created by the Colbert model and for retrieval as well. In...
 

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: September 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.