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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
6.5
Number of Reviews
90
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Integration (5th), Search as a Service (1st), Vector Databases (2nd)
OpenText Knowledge Discover...
Ranking in Indexing and Search
3rd
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 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 OpenText Knowledge Discovery (IDOL) is 6.1%, down from 7.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Indexing and Search Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Elastic Search12.0%
OpenText Knowledge Discovery (IDOL)6.1%
Other81.9%
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.
ERICK RAMIREZ - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead Solutions Architect at IMEXPERTS DO BRASIL
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 solution has great scalability."
"I appreciate that Elastic Enterprise Search is easy to use and that we have people on our team who are able to manage it effectively."
"The initial setup is fairly simple."
"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."
"The most valuable features are its user-friendly interface and seamless navigation."
"The initial installation and setup were straightforward."
"It's a stable solution and we have not had any issues."
"The most valuable features of Elastic Enterprise Search are it's cloud-ready and we do a lot of infrastructure as code. By using ELK, we're able to deploy the solution as part of our ISC deployment."
"Speed improvements over older Fetch architecture."
"Satisfaction and ability to find relevant content has increased over 50% based on our before and after survey results."
"Capability of processing and analysing unstructured data, like audio and video analysis."
"IDOL has several important visual analytics, like face recognition and object detection and recognition."
"Enterprise search success (finding what documents you're looking for) has gone up over 30% with users finding their hit on the first page of results as opposed to the 2,3,4th or giving up entirely."
 

Cons

"Better dashboards or a better configuration system would be very good."
"Technical support should be faster."
"I think the biggest issue we had with Elastic Search was regarding integrations with our multi-factor authentication tool."
"Elasticsearch should have simpler commands for window filtering."
"Elastic Search needs to improve authentication. It also needs to work on the Kibana visualization dashboard."
"The upgrade experience and inflexibility with fields keeps Elastic Search from being a perfect 10."
"The price could be better. Kibana has some limitations in terms of the tablet to view event logs. I also have a high volume of data. On the initialization part, if you chose Kibana, you'll have some limitations. Kibana was primarily proposed as a log data reviewer to build applications to the viewer log data using Kibana. Then it became a virtualization tool, but it still has limitations from a developer's point of view."
"In Elastic Search, the improvements I would like to see require many resources."
"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."
"On-premise implementation and installation is very complicated."
"Technical support could improve a lot."
"Understanding how to optimize Lua Scripting configuration to improve performance. Lua Scripts added to a CFS configuration can cause the CFS processing to slow down, if the scripts are not scoped to only run against specific indexing jobs or database content."
"The interface needs to be mobile friendly, which I understand is in the backlog of future improvements."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This product is open-source and can be used free of charge."
"The tool is an open-source product."
"The price of Elasticsearch is fair. It is a more expensive solution, like QRadar. The price for Elasticsearch is not much more than other solutions we have."
"We are using the free version and intend to upgrade."
"ELK has been considered as an alternative to Splunk to reduce licensing costs."
"The solution is not expensive because users have the option of choosing the managed or the subscription model."
"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."
"I rate Elastic Search's pricing an eight out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Retailer
7%
Transportation Company
18%
Government
16%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

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...
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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: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.