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Elastic Search vs OpenText Knowledge Discovery (IDOL) 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
6.7
Number of Reviews
72
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Integration (10th), Search as a Service (1st), Vector Databases (3rd)
OpenText Knowledge Discover...
Ranking in Indexing and Search
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Indexing and Search category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 22.2%, down from 27.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenText Knowledge Discovery (IDOL) is 6.4%, down from 9.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Indexing and Search Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Search22.2%
OpenText Knowledge Discovery (IDOL)6.4%
Other71.4%
Indexing and Search
 

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.
ERICK RAMIREZ - PeerSpot reviewer
Scales linearly and vertically; primarily used in AI
If I am not wrong, IDOL is working to release improvements in new capabilities in the next six months. There is room for improvement in some very important capabilities in visual analytics. They have been focusing on improving the face recognition algorithm. The accuracy of object detection could be improved as well and I know they are working on that at the moment. I would like to see some machine learning capabilities added to the next release.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features are the ease and speed of the setup."
"Gives us a more user-friendly, centralized solution (for those who just needed a quick glance, without being masters of sed and awk) as well as the ability to implement various mechanisms for machine-learning from our logs, and sending alerts for anomalies."
"It's a stable solution and we have not had any issues."
"It is a stable and good platform."
"Search is really powerful."
"All the quality features are there. There are about 60 to 70 reports available."
"I have found the sort capability of Elastic very useful for allowing us to find the information we need very quickly."
"It helps us to analyse the logs based on the location, user, and other log parameters."
"IDOL has several important visual analytics, like face recognition and object detection and recognition."
 

Cons

"Improving machine learning capabilities would be beneficial."
"There are challenges with performance management and scalability."
"There is another solution I'm testing which has a 500 record limit when you do a search on Elastic Enterprise Search. That's the only area in which I'm not sure whether it's a limitation on our end in terms of knowledge or a technical limitation from Elastic Enterprise Search. There is another solution we are looking at that rides on Elastic Enterprise Search. And the limit is for any sort of records that you're doing or data analysis you're trying to do, you can only extract 500 records at a time. I know the open-source nature has a lot of limitations, Otherwise, Elastic Enterprise Search is a fantastic solution and I'd recommend it to anyone."
"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."
"I would rate the stability a seven out of ten. We faced a few issues."
"There is an index issue in which the data starts to crash as it increases."
"Elastic Search could benefit from a more user-friendly onboarding process for beginners."
"Dashboards could be more flexible, and it would be nice to provide more drill-down capabilities."
"There is room for improvement in some very important capabilities in visual analytics. They have been focusing on improving the face recognition algorithm. The accuracy of object detection could be improved as well and I know they are working on that at the moment."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price could be better."
"The basic license is free, but it comes with a lot of features that aren't free. With a gold license, we get active directory integration. With a platinum license, we get alerting."
"We are using the Community Edition because Elasticsearch's licensing model is not flexible or suitable for us. They ask for an annual subscription. We also got the development consultancy from Elasticsearch for 60 days or something like that, but they were just trying to do the same trick. That's why we didn't purchase it. We are just using the Community Edition."
"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."
"ELK has been considered as an alternative to Splunk to reduce licensing costs."
"The solution is less expensive than Stackdriver and Grafana."
"The price of Elastic Enterprise is very, very competitive."
"We are using the open-sourced version."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
24%
Transportation Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise33
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?
Elastic Search could improve in areas such as search criteria and query processes, as search times were longer prior to implementing Elastic Search. Elastic Search has limitations for handling huge...
Ask a question
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Comparisons

No data available
 

Also Known As

Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
Micro Focus IDOL, HPE Autonomy IDOL, HPE IDOL
 

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.
RTVE, Krungthai Bank, Kainos, Capax Discovery
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Search vs. OpenText Knowledge Discovery (IDOL) and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
866,218 professionals have used our research since 2012.