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Elastic Search vs OpenText Knowledge Discovery (IDOL) comparison

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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
5th
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 September 2026, in the Indexing and Search category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 9.4%, down from 21.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenText Knowledge Discovery (IDOL) is 6.2%, down from 7.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Indexing and Search Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Elastic Search9.4%
OpenText Knowledge Discovery (IDOL)6.2%
Other84.4%
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 initial installation and setup were straightforward."
"The AI-based attribute tagging is a valuable feature."
"Dashboard is very customizable."
"The product is scalable with good performance."
"The most valuable features are its user-friendly interface and seamless navigation."
"My favorite feature is always aggregations and aggregators; you do not have to do multiple queries and it is always optimized for me, and I always got the perfect results because I am using full text search with aliases and keyword search, everything I am performing it, and it always performs out of the box."
"The pricing and license model are clear: node-based model."
"I really like the visualization that you can do within it; that's really handy, and product-wise, it is a very good and stable product."
"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."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"They could simplify the Filebeat and Logstash configuration piece. There are a lot of manual steps on the operating system."
"There are challenges with performance management and scalability."
"Elastic Search could benefit from a more user-friendly onboarding process for beginners."
"Elastic Enterprise Search could improve its SSL integration easier. We should not need to go to the back-end servers to do configuration, we should be able to do it on the GUI."
"Elasticsearch is useful for different business processes, but there are some problems."
"There are some features lacking in ELK Elasticsearch."
"They should improve its documentation. Their official documentation is not very informative."
"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."
"Technical support could improve a lot."
"On-premise implementation and installation is very complicated."
"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."
"The interface needs to be mobile friendly, which I understand is in the backlog of future improvements."
"IDOL's tech support needs improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It can be expensive."
"We are paying $1,500 a month to use the solution. If you want to have endpoint protection you need to pay more."
"The solution is free."
"I rate Elastic Search's pricing an eight out of ten."
"The pricing structure depends on the scalability steps."
"ELK has been considered as an alternative to Splunk to reduce licensing costs."
"We use the free version for some logs, but not extensive use."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Construction Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

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: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.