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Elastic Search vs Qdrant 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 Vector Databases
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
90
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (6th), Search as a Service (1st)
Qdrant
Ranking in Vector Databases
4th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.8
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (11th), AI Data Analysis (17th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 4.0%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Qdrant is 7.6%, up from 7.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Elastic Search4.0%
Qdrant7.6%
Other88.4%
Vector Databases
 

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.
reviewer2811174 - PeerSpot reviewer
AI Developer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Vector search has transformed support workflows and drives faster, more accurate responses
Qdrant can be improved in several ways. A dashboard or UI for re-indexing large collections without downtime and performance degradation would be valuable. The ecosystem around managed backups and cross-region replication could be more seamless for global deployments. Built-in analytics or observability tooling, such as a query performance dashboard and index health monitor, would reduce reliance on external tools. Tighter integration with popular orchestration frameworks like LangChain and LlamaIndex out of the box and more intuitive documentation would be very helpful. Developers need parameters for advanced fine-tuning, such as HNSW settings, and documentation could be clearer. For people without much experience in AI frameworks or vector databases, easier documentation would be helpful. At least the setup part could be simpler. These are some negatives I am observing.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The best feature of Elastic Search is it does exactly what it says."
"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."
"The most valuable feature for us is the analytics that we can configure and view using Kibana."
"The ability to aggregate log and machine data into a searchable index reduces time to identify and isolate issues for an application. Saves time in triage and incident response by eliminating manual steps to access and parse logs on separate systems, within large infrastructure footprints."
"The security portion of Elasticsearch is particularly beneficial, allowing me to view and analyze security alerts."
"Dashboard is very customizable."
"The most valuable features are its user-friendly interface and seamless navigation."
"Elasticsearch includes a graphical user interface (GUI) called Kibana. The GUI features are extremely beneficial to us."
"Due to its quantization ability, we were able to store the same amount of data in less space, which reduced our cloud bills by 30%."
"Using Qdrant's hybrid search capability has improved my search results."
"Due to its quantization ability, we were able to store the same amount of data in less space, which reduced our cloud bills by 30%."
 

Cons

"We'd like more user-friendly integrations."
"Elastic Enterprise Search can improve by adding some kind of search that can be used out of the box without too much struggle with configuration. With every kind of search engine, there is some kind of special function that you need to do. A simple out-of-the-box search would be useful."
"It needs email notification, similar to what Logentries has. Because of the notification issue, we moved to Logentries, as it provides a simple way to receive notification whenever a server encounters an error or unexpected conditions (which we have defined using RegEx​)."
"Improving machine learning capabilities would be beneficial."
"I would like to see more integration for the solution with different platforms."
"The one area that can use improvement is the automapping of fields."
"The real-time search functionality is not operational due to its impact on system resources."
"What they need is to be more transparent about the actual setup of the cluster and the deployment process."
"Qdrant can be improved in several ways."
"Qdrant can be improved in several ways."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate Elastic Search's pricing an eight out of ten."
"The tool is not expensive. Its licensing costs are yearly."
"The price of Elastic Enterprise is very, very competitive."
"An X-Pack license is more affordable than Splunk."
"The version of Elastic Enterprise Search I am using is open source which is free. The pricing model should improve for the enterprise version because it is very expensive."
"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."
"We are using the free version and intend to upgrade."
"we are using a licensed version of the product."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
7%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Manufacturing 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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Qdrant?
Using Qdrant is free. We house it and have a VM where we just installed it on the VM.
What needs improvement with Qdrant?
I should check if real-time data updates in Qdrant have helped improve my models, as I don't even know they have that feature. A lot of our work is agentic right now, and we have also segmented the...
What is your primary use case for Qdrant?
My primary use cases for Qdrant are legal and educational.
 

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 Microsoft, Elastic, Redis and others in Vector Databases. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.