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

Elastic Search vs IBM Watson Discovery 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

Elastic Search
Ranking in Indexing and Search
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
90
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Integration (5th), Search as a Service (1st), Vector Databases (2nd)
IBM Watson Discovery
Ranking in Indexing and Search
10th
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Indexing and Search category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 12.0%, down from 26.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Watson Discovery is 3.6%, down from 4.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Indexing and Search Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Elastic Search12.0%
IBM Watson Discovery3.6%
Other84.4%
Indexing and Search
 

Featured Reviews

Anurag Pal - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
Search and aggregations have transformed how I manage and visualize complex real estate data
Elastic Search consumes lots of memory. You have to provide the heap size a lot if you want the best out of it. The major problem is when a company wants to use Elastic Search but it is at a startup stage. At a startup stage, there is a lot of funds to consider. However, their use case is that they have to use a pretty significant amount of data. For that, it is very expensive. For example, if you take OLTP-based databases in the current scenario, such as ClickHouse or Iceberg, you can do it on 4GB RAM also. Elastic Search is for analytical records. You have to do the analytics on it. According to me, as far as I have seen, people will start moving from Elastic Search sooner or later. Why? Because it is expensive. Another thing is that there is an open source available for that, such as ClickHouse. Around 2014 and 2012, there was only one competitor at that time, which was Solr. But now, not only is Solr there, but you can take ClickHouse and you have Iceberg also. How are we going to compete with them? There is also a fork of Elastic Search that is OpenSearch. As far as I have seen in lots of articles I am reading, users are using it as the ELK stack for logs and analyzing logs. That is not the exact use case. It can do more than that if used correctly. But as it involves lots of cost, people are shifting from Elastic Search to other sources. When I am talking about pricing, it is not only the server pricing. It is the amount of memory it is using. The pricing is basically the heap Java, which is taking memory. That is the major problem happening here. If we have to run an MVP, a client comes to me and says, "Anurag, we need to do a proof of concept. Can we do it if I can pay a 4GB or 16GB expense?" How can I suggest to them that a minimum of 16GB is needed for Elastic Search so that your proof of concept will be proved? In that case, what I have to suggest from the beginning is to go with Cassandra or at the initial stage, go with PostgreSQL. The problem is the memory it is taking. That is the only thing.
Geraldo Lima - PeerSpot reviewer
Sales Director at Kukac
Stable, scalable, and has testing and conversational AI features
The total time it takes to deploy IBM Watson Discovery depends on the documents you'll be working with. For example, I was in a situation where I was working with some painting files and folders for a painting store. The store had PDF documents, but the information was mixed up, so I had to treat the documents on IBM Watson Discovery, and discovering and understanding each PDF file took longer. The process is more straightforward for plain documents, and you have to work with questions that will help IBM Watson Discovery understand the documents. The time to deploy the product depends on the quantity and type of documents you'll be working with.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"X-Pack provides good features, like authorization and alerts."
"The ability to aggregate log and machine data into a searchable index reduces time to identify and isolate issues for an application. Saves time in triage and incident response by eliminating manual steps to access and parse logs on separate systems, within large infrastructure footprints."
"ELK Elasticsearch is 100% scalable as scalability is built into the design"
"It's a stable solution and we have not had any issues."
"Elastic Search has impacted my organization positively as we use it for logging and APM."
"Helps us to store the data in key value pairs and, based on that, we can produce visualisations in Kibana."
"On the subject of pricing, Elastic Search is very cost-efficient, as you can host it on-premises, which would incur zero cost, or take it as a SaaS-based service, where the expenses remain minimal."
"The machine learning features of Elastic Search are very interesting, including the possibility to include models such as ELSER and different multilingual models that let us fine-tune our searches and use them in our search projects."
"Being able to have some rules to extract the entities is valuable. The capability to crawl external sites and internal documents, and then draw internal information with external contents is also valuable."
"Language support and the ability to build a natural language of speech recognition are the most valuable features."
"The most valuable features of IBM Watson Discovery are the integration with the rest of the Watson Suite and the Watson Assistant capability. If you use Watson Assistant, the ability for it to be able to determine the accuracy of your voice models and your voice response systems is a benefit."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Watson Discovery is testing, mainly because the product applies conversational AI, which means I can ask questions to get the information I want from a specific test area."
 

Cons

"The one area that can use improvement is the automapping of fields."
"I think the pricing of Elastic Search is really, really expensive."
"Could have more open source tools and testing."
"There is a lack of technical people to develop, implement and optimize equipment operation and web queries."
"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."
"The most significant issue I find with Elastic Search is that it gets out of sync, and this has happened in both cases where I have implemented it."
"New Relic could be more flexible, similar to Elasticsearch."
"The solution must provide AI integrations."
"It needs a lot of memory. Our index is very big. It is around 100 gigabytes. So, we need more than 100 gigabytes of memory to use Watson."
"The pricing is an area for improvement in IBM Watson Discovery because the customer initially used the free version. Still, when he needed more questions and documents, he had to move to a different version, which was paid and cost $500 per month. That change in pricing made my company lose many customers."
"The support from IBM Watson Discovery is good but could improve to make it great."
"There are probably other chatbots out there that were built for specific use cases and are easier to deploy than this. Having said that, Watson is way more flexible. While it may require a greater amount of effort, it is not substantially more than some of the other ones that are kind of prebuilt for a specific use case. It would be good to have more prebuilt and specific use cases and specific business models. It can have better phone integration, even though I think that it is actually becoming less of an issue. Most people are online nowadays."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The version of Elastic Enterprise Search I am using is open source which is free. The pricing model should improve for the enterprise version because it is very expensive."
"We are using the free version and intend to upgrade."
"Elastic Search is open-source, but you need to pay for support, which is expensive."
"To access all the features available you require both the open source license and the production license."
"ELK has been considered as an alternative to Splunk to reduce licensing costs."
"We are using the open-sourced version."
"This is a free, open source software (FOSS) tool, which means no cost on the front-end. There are no free lunches in this world though. Technical skill to implement and support are costly on the back-end with ELK, whether you train/hire internally or go for premium services from Elastic."
"The price of Elastic Enterprise is very, very competitive."
"IBM Watson Discovery is an expensive product."
"Cost-wise, it is very reasonable because it is cloud-based."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Indexing and Search solutions are best for your needs.
884,933 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Retailer
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business38
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise45
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?
On the subject of pricing, Elastic Search is very cost-efficient. You can host it on-premises, which would incur zero cost, or take it as a SaaS-based service, where the expenses remain minimal.
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
From the UI point of view, we are using most probably Kibana, and I think they can do much better than that. That is something they can fine-tune a little bit, and then it will definitely be a good...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

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.
Prudential, Bradesco, Woodside
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Search vs. IBM Watson Discovery and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,933 professionals have used our research since 2012.