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Elastic Search vs Qdrant 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
3.8
Organizations leverage Elastic Search for faster performance, cost efficiency, and seamless integration, significantly enhancing resource and time management.
Sentiment score
5.5
Qdrant boosts ROI by cutting costs, improving productivity, and enhancing efficiency through payload filtering and open-source flexibility.
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
Thanks to Qdrant's open-source nature, our initial licensing and setup costs were nearly zero, allowing for swift testing and launch of our RAG prototype.
Automation Engineer at a educational organization with 11-50 employees
This lowers our LLM input token consumption by roughly 30 to 40 percent, translating directly into lower monthly OpenAI API bills.
MLOps Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
The time saved is substantial, with nearly three weeks or more for projects deployed with Qdrant Cloud in no-code platforms.
Lead Ai Tech And Tech Automation Engineer at a individual & family service with 11-50 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.4
Elastic Search's support is praised for responsiveness and helpfulness, with strong community resources and comprehensive documentation available.
Sentiment score
4.8
Qdrant customer service excels with developer-focused support via Discord and documentation, with reduced need for direct contact.
For P1 tickets, they provide very immediate quick responses and join calls to support and troubleshoot the issue accordingly.
Elastic Engineer at The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI)
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's open source, so we house it on our server.
Chief Ai Scientist at Predictive Systems
The documentation provided by Qdrant covers most queries effectively.
Lead Ai Tech And Tech Automation Engineer at a individual & family service with 11-50 employees
Qdrant's customer support is responsive and developer-focused.
MLOps Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.2
Elastic Search provides scalable solutions praised for flexibility, though complex for large datasets, with satisfaction in performance and planning.
Sentiment score
5.7
Qdrant excels in scalability and performance, efficiently managing large datasets, particularly when deployed in Docker for enhanced growth.
We can search through that document quite easily, sometimes in 7 milliseconds, sometimes one or two milliseconds.
Product Engineer at A3L
Performance tests involving one million requests at once, we encountered issues with shards and nodes not upscaling as needed, leading to crashes and minimal data loss.
Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
I would rate its scalability a ten.
Backend Developer
In the recruiting agency project, the reliance on the vector database has expanded from storing hundreds of resumes to thousands.
Lead Ai Tech And Tech Automation Engineer at a individual & family service with 11-50 employees
When Qdrant is deployed in Docker, it scales really fast, and you can assign multiple CPUs to enhance performance.
Analyst at Synergy Connect
Qdrant is highly scalable, supporting both vertical and horizontal scaling across massive vector data sets.
MLOps Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Elastic Search is praised for stability, with minor issues under heavy load or poor query design, rated highly by users.
Sentiment score
7.9
Qdrant, built in Rust, is praised for reliability, fast queries, and precision, despite minor cloud termination limitations.
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
Built in Rust, it delivers sub-15 millisecond response times and rock-solid update and write-ahead logging to guarantee that newly indexed data is immediately searchable without dropping queries or producing inconsistent context for LLMs.
MLOps Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
You need to patch Qdrant as soon as patches are released.
Co Founder & CEO at SaYukth Private Limited
It is easy to use whether on LangChain or on its own.
Product Engineer at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
 

Room For Improvement

Elastic Search needs better mapping, scalability, AI integration, pricing, support, documentation, usability, and intuitive interfaces for improved user experience.
Qdrant needs developer experience enhancements, including multi-query fusion, embedding support, schema management, and improved deployment, UI, and documentation.
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
Fast large-scale filtering operations could be implemented, such as automatic index suggestions, adaptive query planning, and smart indexing of metadata fields, which would make Qdrant even more efficient.
Product Engineer at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
While it has clustering functionality, it is not easy to set up, and not everyone can configure the clustering, so there is room for improvement in the clustering configuration.
Co Founder & CEO at SaYukth Private Limited
Incorporating embedding features directly in Qdrant Cloud would eliminate the need to depend on external solutions.
Lead Ai Tech And Tech Automation Engineer at a individual & family service with 11-50 employees
 

Setup Cost

Elastic Search offers free open-source and paid plans with varied pricing, noted for both complexity and scalability.
Qdrant provides cost-effective, predictable billing and zero upfront investment, with open-source access and easy setup options.
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.
Staff Software Engineer at Agoda
The core product is open source under Apache 2.0, so initial experimentation and local integration testing cost nothing.
MLOps Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
Using Qdrant is free.
Chief Ai Scientist at Predictive Systems
Regarding pricing, setup costs, and licensing, since I am using only the free tier of Qdrant Cloud, there are no setup costs involved.
Lead Ai Tech And Tech Automation Engineer at a individual & family service with 11-50 employees
 

Valuable Features

Elastic Search offers high search capabilities, scalability, real-time efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and seamless integration with tools like Kibana.
Qdrant provides fast, efficient vector search with hybrid indexing, Python support, and open-source configuration for scalable AI projects.
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 ability of Qdrant to handle high-dimensional vectors for my AI projects is pretty fast, and I think it's the best we have used so far.
Chief Ai Scientist at Predictive Systems
An accuracy boost was definitely observed from 45 to 50% using Faiss to around 85 to 95% using Qdrant, and the users are really happy as they are getting suggested really good schemes that would take a lot of time to find.
Analyst at Synergy Connect
Qdrant supports high-dimension vectors and cosine similarity, which any vector database should have, and it is pretty fast.
CTO at Honeycomb AI
 

Categories and Ranking

Elastic Search
Ranking in Vector Databases
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
100
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (5th), Search as a Service (1st)
Qdrant
Ranking in Vector Databases
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (5th), AI Data Analysis (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 5.3%, up from 4.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Qdrant is 6.3%, down from 8.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Qdrant6.3%
Elastic Search5.3%
Other88.4%
Vector Databases
 

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.
Pawel Cislo - PeerSpot reviewer
MLOps Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
Adaptive assistant has delivered faster grounded answers and has reduced token costs significantly
The main limitations I notice come down to developer experience and native features rather than performance. Building hybrid retrieval and fusion pipelines still requires considerable manual orchestration and code. Having more built-in multi-query fusion strategies natively inside Qdrant would be a significant time-saver. Additionally, managing dynamic metadata schemas and tracking index build progress during bulk ingest could be more transparent in the web UI. To make things easier for developers, Qdrant could provide more native tools for managing payload schema evolution over time. As metadata needs change in production RAG systems, updating existing payloads across large collections currently requires custom migration scripts. Built-in schema versioning and simpler automated index testing during CI/CD would make running Qdrant in rapidly evolving production environments even smoother. I rate Qdrant 9 out of 10 because its speed, sub-15 millisecond retrieval, and single-stage payload filtering make it top-tier for production RAG pipelines. I deduct one point mainly for developer experience. Setting up multi-query fusion still requires extra boilerplate code, payload metadata schema updates require custom migration scripts, and real-time visibility into HNSW graph indexing progress during bulk ingest could be improved in the web UI.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business40
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise50
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise2
 

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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Qdrant?
I find Qdrant's pricing and licensing extremely straightforward and cost-effective. The core product is open source under Apache 2.0, so initial experimentation and local integration testing cost n...
What needs improvement with Qdrant?
Qdrant is available through a containerized Docker, but a normal deployment in Qdrant is not there, and that can actually be worked out. That was one aspect I thought about, because I need to have ...
What is your primary use case for Qdrant?
We have a full-fledged RAG system using Qdrant Vector Database, and that is how it has benefited us. For example, we have implemented a techno-commercial evaluator using that, and it is in producti...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
No data available
 

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.
1. Airbnb 2. Amazon 3. Apple 4. BMW 5.Cisco 6. CocaCola 7. Dell 8. Disney 9. Google 10. HP 11. IBM 12. Intel 13. JPMorgan Chase 14. Kraft Heinz 15. L'Oreal 16. McDonalds 17. Merck 18. Microsoft 19. Nike20. Oracle 21. PG 22. PepsiCo 23. Procter and Gamble 24. Samsung 25. Shell 26. Sony 27. Toyota 28. Visa 29. Walmart 30. WeWork
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Search vs. Qdrant and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.