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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
99
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Integration (5th), Search as a Service (1st), Vector Databases (5th)
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 June 2026, in the Indexing and Search category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 10.1%, down from 24.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Watson Discovery is 3.2%, down from 4.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Indexing and Search Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Elastic Search10.1%
IBM Watson Discovery3.2%
Other86.7%
Indexing and Search
 

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.
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

"The tool's stability and performance are good."
"We are developing a SIEM application that is similar to QRadar, ArcSight, or Splunk, and this application uses Elasticsearch as its search engine because we want to retrieve information fast."
"Elastic Search, being a vector database, quickly indexes data, allowing for searches based on text and data directly, which I found fascinating."
"Elastic Search positively impacts my company with many benefits across multiple use cases; for example, it enables quick dashboard setups for client reviews and presents data efficiently, ensuring good user experience."
"If you decide to run with it, the performance and the result can be very satisfactory."
"It is easy to scale with the cluster node model.​"
"Elastic Search is very user-friendly, and we can easily integrate it with third-party models and other AWS S3 buckets."
"Implementing the main requirements regarding my support portal​."
"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."
"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."
"It has allowed us to provide longer service availability for support to users."
"Being able to have some rules to extract the entities is valuable."
"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."
"Language support and the ability to build a natural language of speech recognition are the most valuable features."
 

Cons

"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, but with Elastic Search, it takes a little bit of time, ten to fifteen seconds."
"There should be more stability."
"I would rate technical support from Elastic Search as three out of ten. The main issue is a general sum of all factors."
"There is another solution I'm testing which has a 500 record limit when you do a search on Elastic Enterprise Search."
"There are a few things that did not work for us. When doing a search in a bigger setup, with a huge amount of data where there are several things coming in, it has to be on top of the index that we search."
"In Elastic Search, the improvements I would like to see require many resources."
"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."
"The UI point of view is not very powerful because it is dependent on Kibana."
"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."
"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."
"IBM Watson Discovery has moved to a newer version and it is very difficult to train the newer version."
"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."
"There are probably other chatbots out there that were built for specific use cases and are easier to deploy than this."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is free."
"​The pricing and license model are clear: node-based model."
"The price of Elastic Enterprise is very, very competitive."
"There is a free version, and there is also a hosted version for which you have to pay. We're currently using the free version. If things go well, we might go for the paid version."
"An X-Pack license is more affordable than Splunk."
"The pricing model is questionable and needs to be addressed because when you would like to have the security they charge per machine."
"The solution is not expensive because users have the option of choosing the managed or the subscription model."
"The price could be better."
"Cost-wise, it is very reasonable because it is cloud-based."
"IBM Watson Discovery is an expensive product."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Retailer
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business40
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise49
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ELK Elasticsearch?
Elastic Search is easy to use in Azure cloud. Mostly, my full company uses Azure cloud, so it is easy to use. Cost-wise, my company found Elastic Search is good. Cost matters. Based on cost and use...
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
The initial configuration could be easier; at first, the learning curve is a little high, and over time, it becomes easier. For me, the initial configuration might be improved.
What is your primary use case for ELK Elasticsearch?
We use Elastic Search for a research application based on paper study, and the primary usage is for indexing the data and then functioning in a similar way to an e-commerce search bar.
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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: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.