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

Elastic Search vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
4.4
Elastic Search enhanced efficiency and performance, offering substantial time and cost savings, despite mixed opinions on return metrics.
Sentiment score
6.2
Organizations report cost savings and efficiency with Azure Cosmos DB, but some experience complexity and difficulty achieving expected savings.
We have not purchased any licensed products, and our use of Elastic Search is purely open-source, contributing positively to our ROI.
Software Engineer at Government of India
It is stable, and we do not encounter critical issues like server downtime, which could result in data loss.
SOC A2 at Innodata-ISOGEN
The main benefits observed from using Elastic Search include improvements in operational efficiency, along with cost, time, and resource savings.
Senior Devops Engineer at Ubique Digital LTD
Getting an MVP of that project would have taken six to eight months, but because we had an active choice of using Azure Cosmos DB and other related cloud-native services of Azure, we were able to get to an MVP stage in a matter of weeks, which is six weeks.
Director | Data & AI at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
You can react quickly and trim down the specs, memory, RAM, storage size, etc. It can save about 20% of the costs.
Co-Founder at arpa
When I have done comparisons or cost calculations, I have sometimes personally seen as much as 25% to 30% savings.
Solutions Architect at CompuNet
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.2
Elastic Search offers expert support and documentation, though response times and communication could improve for some users.
Sentiment score
6.7
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB support is generally responsive, but experiences vary, with premium users often reporting better satisfaction.
The customer support for Elastic Search is one of the best I have ever tried.
Software Developer at a media company with 10,001+ employees
They have always been really responsible and responsive to my requests.
Security Lead at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees
It has been sufficient to visit conferences such as SCALE in Southern California Linux Expo, where Elastic Search has a booth to talk to their staff.
Principal Scientific Computing Software Engineer at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees
Premier Support has deteriorated compared to what it used to be, especially for small to medium-sized customers like ours.
Head of IT, Infrastructure, Operations & Applications Development at a manufacturing company with 201-500 employees
The response was quick.
Lead Cloud Architect at Solliance, Inc
I would rate customer service and support a nine out of ten.
Director | Data & AI at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Elastic Search is highly scalable, enabling efficient node addition, though sharding, replication, and storage demands require careful management.
Sentiment score
7.7
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB offers scalable, flexible solutions with efficient cost management, ideal for large enterprises, despite partition size limits.
I would rate its scalability a ten.
Backend Developer
Since we're on the cloud, whenever we need to upgrade or add resources, they handle everything.
Security Lead at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees
We haven't encountered any problems so far, and there is the potential for auto-scaling.
Head of Data Management at Zeno Health
The system scales up capacity when needed and scales down when not in use, preventing unnecessary expenses.
Associate Software Architect at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
We like that it can auto-scale to demand, ensuring we only pay for what we use.
CTO at Stellium Consulting
We have had no issues with its ability to search through large amounts of data.
Full Stack Software Developer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Elastic Search is stable and reliable, despite some challenges, as proper management ensures performance under varying loads.
Sentiment score
7.6
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB offers high availability and reliability, with users praising its scalability, integration, and minimal downtime.
The data transfer sometimes exceeded the bandwidth limits without proper notification, which caused issues.
SOC A2 at Innodata-ISOGEN
The stability of Elasticsearch was very high.
Backend Developer
When you put one keyword, everything related to that keyword in your ecosystem will showcase all the results.
Chief Information Security Officer at CDSL Ventures Limited
We have multiple availability zones, so nothing goes down.
Hands on user at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Azure Cosmos DB would be a good choice if you have to deploy your application in a limited time frame and you want to auto-scale the database across different applications.
Associate Data Analytics L1 at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
I would rate it a ten out of ten in terms of availability and latency.
Azure Consultant at Deloitte
 

Room For Improvement

Elastic Search needs better security, pricing, machine learning, scalability, ease of use, and support, facing significant user challenges.
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB needs improvements in query complexity, API integration, performance, documentation, cost management, and user-interface enhancements.
From a technical point of view, there are no significant issues recalled as Elastic Search has been absolutely awesome for this use case and covers 100% of the needs.
Principal Scientific Computing Software Engineer at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees
If I need to parse one million records saved into Elastic Search, it becomes a nightmare because I need to do the pagination, and it is very problematic in that regard.
Lead Engineer at Spidersilk
Observability features like search latency, indexing rate, and maybe rejected requests should be added to make the platform more reliable and accessible for everyone.
Senior System Engineer at EPAM Systems
We must ensure data security remains the top priority.
Cloud Solutions Architect and Microsoft Principal Consultant for EMEA at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
You have to monitor the Request Units.
Co-Founder at arpa
The dashboard could include more detailed RU descriptions, IOPS, and compute metrics.
Architecte Cloud at Visiativ SA
 

Setup Cost

Elastic Search's open-source version is free, but enterprises face costs in skills, training, support, and premium features.
Azure Cosmos DB pricing varies, appreciated for scalability but seen as costly with high demand and complex environments.
On the AWS side, it is very expensive because they charge based on query basis or how much data is transferred in and out, making it very expensive.
Lead Engineer at Spidersilk
Having the hosted solution and not having to pay for essentially a DevOps person on staff to manage makes it affordable.
CTO at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
You can host it on-premises, which would incur zero cost, or take it as a SaaS-based service, where the expenses remain minimal.
Senior Software Engineer at Agoda
Initially, it seemed like an expensive way to manage a NoSQL data store, but so many improvements that have been made to the platform have made it cost-effective.
Lead Cloud Architect at Solliance, Inc
Cosmos DB is expensive, and the RU-based pricing model is confusing.
IT Data Architect & Manager at Ternium Mexico S.A. de C.V.
Cosmos DB is great compared to other databases because we can reduce the cost while doing the same things.
Lead Software Architect at CPower
 

Valuable Features

Elasticsearch offers real-time monitoring, scalability, and integration with Kibana, enhancing data retrieval, security, customization, and decision-making.
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is valued for scalability, ease of integration, global distribution, security, and support for diverse applications.
Elastic Search makes handling large data volumes efficient and supports complex search operations.
Software Engineer at Government of India
The most valuable feature of Elasticsearch was the quick search capability, allowing us to search by any criteria needed.
Backend Developer
The speed with which Elastic Search is able to search through all of the documents we place into it is quite remarkable, as we search through 65 billion documents in less than a second in most cases, on a constant consistent basis.
Director, Software Engineering at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is its real-time analytics capabilities, which allow for turnaround times in milliseconds.
Vice President, Machine Learning at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Performance and security are valuable features, particularly when using Cosmos DB for MongoDB emulation and NoSQL.
IT Data Architect & Manager at Ternium Mexico S.A. de C.V.
The performance and scaling capabilities of Cosmos DB are excellent, allowing it to handle large workloads compared to other services such as Azure AI Search.
CTO at Stellium Consulting
 

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 (5th), Search as a Service (1st)
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB
Ranking in Vector Databases
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
109
Ranking in other categories
Database as a Service (DBaaS) (4th), NoSQL Databases (2nd), Managed NoSQL Databases (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 3.9%, down from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 5.9%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB5.9%
Elastic Search3.9%
Other90.2%
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.
reviewer2724105 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Director of Product Management at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Provides super sharp latency, excellent availability, and the ability to effectively manage costs across different tenants
For integrating Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB with other Azure products or other products, there are a couple of challenges with the current system. Right now, the vectors are stored as floating-point numbers within the NoSQL document, which makes them inefficiently large. This leads to increased storage space requirements, and searching through a vast number of documents in the vector database becomes quite costly in terms of RUs. While the integration works well, the expense associated with it is relatively high. I would really like to see a reduction in costs for their vector search, as it is currently on the expensive side. The areas for improvement in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB are vector pricing and vector indexing patterns, which are unintuitive and not well described. I would also like to see the parameters of Fleet Spaces made more powerful, as currently, it's somewhat lightweight. I believe they've made those changes intentionally to better understand the cost model. However, we would like to take a more aggressive approach in using it. One of the most frustrating aspects of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB right now is that you can only store one vector per document. Additionally, you must specify the configuration of that vector when you create an instance of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB. Once the database is set up, you can't change the vector configuration, which is incredibly limiting for experimentation. You want the ability to try different settings and see how they perform, as there are numerous use cases for storing more than one vector in a document. While interoperability within the vector database is acceptable—for example, I can search for vectors—I still desire a richer set of configuration options.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Vector Databases solutions are best for your needs.
881,733 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
6%
Legal Firm
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise43
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise58
 

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?
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 inde...
What do you like most about Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
The initial setup is simple and straightforward. You can set up a Cosmos DB in a day, even configuring things like availability zones around the world.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's pricing model has aligned with my budget expectations because I can tune the RU as I need to, which helps a lot. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's dynamic auto-scale or server...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
I have not utilized Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB multi-model support for handling diverse data types. I'm not in the position to decide if clients will use Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB or any other datab...
 

Also Known As

Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, MS Azure Cosmos DB
 

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.
TomTom, KPMG Australia, Bosch, ASOS, Mercedes Benz, NBA, Zero Friction, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, Kinectify
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,733 professionals have used our research since 2012.