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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
100
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Integration (5th), Search as a Service (1st), Vector Databases (6th)
OpenText Knowledge Discover...
Ranking in Indexing and Search
6th
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 2026, in the Indexing and Search category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 9.8%, down from 22.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenText Knowledge Discovery (IDOL) is 6.4%, up from 6.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Indexing and Search Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Elastic Search9.8%
OpenText Knowledge Discovery (IDOL)6.4%
Other83.8%
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.
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 pricing and license model are clear: node-based model."
"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."
"In summary, Elasticsearch is a very useful product that I can quickly recommend."
"The most valuable features are the data store and the X-pack extension."
"I think that Elasticsearch is a good product and cheaper than Splunk."
"There's lots of processing power. You can actually just add machines to get more performance if you need to. It's pretty flexible and very easy to add another log. It's not like 'oh, no, it's going to be so much extra data'. That's not a problem for the machine. It can handle it."
"It is a stable and good platform."
"The special text processing features in this solution are very important for me."
"Capability of processing and analysing unstructured data, like audio and video analysis."
"Speed improvements over older Fetch architecture."
"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."
"IDOL is a scalable solution: If a client needs to process more unstructured media content, they can scale IDOL both linearly and vertically, and you can scale this solution very easily."
"Satisfaction and ability to find relevant content has increased over 50% based on our before and after survey results."
"IDOL has several important visual analytics, like face recognition and object detection and recognition."
 

Cons

"I see that there are areas in Elastic Search that have room for improvement, such as user documentation and onboarding processes."
"In terms of product improvement, ratio aggregation is not supported in this solution."
"It needs email notification, similar to what Logentries has."
"They could simplify the Filebeat and Logstash configuration piece. There are a lot of manual steps on the operating system."
"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."
"Pagination in Elastic Search is very slow."
"I have not been using the solution for many years to know exactly the improvements needed. However, they could simplify how the YML files have to be structured properly."
"Elastic Enterprise Search could improve the report templates."
"On-premise implementation and installation is very complicated."
"The interface needs to be mobile friendly, which I understand is in the backlog of future improvements."
"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."
"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."
"IDOL's tech support needs improvement."
"Technical support could improve a lot."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing structure depends on the scalability steps."
"An X-Pack license is more affordable than Splunk."
"ELK has been considered as an alternative to Splunk to reduce licensing costs."
"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 solution is not expensive because users have the option of choosing the managed or the subscription model."
"The solution is affordable."
"​The pricing and license model are clear: node-based model."
"Although the ELK Elasticsearch software is open-source, we buy the hardware."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Construction Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business40
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise50
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ELK Elasticsearch?
The pricing for Elastic Search is mainly budgeted according to the organization budget, so we take it as a yearly subscription, and that is acceptable since we do get a fair discount when we are ta...
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
When we get the logs, it is mostly about how we edit the configurations and how we make changes according to the requirements of our organization. In these cases, the logs sometimes can be a bit in...
What is your primary use case for ELK Elasticsearch?
I am the Elastic Search admin for my organization, and we are using Elastic Search to handle the traffic to GCP. The monitoring of all the clusters and all the deployments are quite good, and compa...
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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: August 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.