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Elastic Search vs Vespa 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 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 (8th), Search as a Service (1st)
Vespa
Ranking in Vector Databases
18th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.3
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (18th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 5.5%, up from 4.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Vespa is 2.6%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Elastic Search5.5%
Vespa2.6%
Other91.9%
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.
Ganaraj Amakrishna - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Technical Architect at Zoro UK
Vector search has improved e‑commerce relevance but setup and learning curve still need work
Vespa definitely had its own set of challenges. It was really hard to get into initially, especially when I started implementing it in 2024 along with one junior employee, and the lack of documentation made it difficult. I aimed for an implementation with ColBERT, a sparse embedding mechanism, which I believed would fit well for e-commerce. We went through iterations during A/B testing because the initial set did not work as expected, which extended the process to about one and a half years. Vespa has a considerable learning curve, making it challenging for most people to get into, and it is also expensive, which can deter startups or those with smaller budgets from using it. Community support was decent, and we turned to it for clarifications. However, substantial improvements in documentation are necessary, especially more examples for handling DSL effectively. Having a runtime testing feature would greatly facilitate quick iterations.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"ELK Elasticsearch is 100% scalable as scalability is built into the design"
"The solution has good security features. I have been happy with the dashboards and interface."
"You have dashboards, it is visual, there are maps, you can create canvases. It's more visual than anything that I've ever used."
"Elastic Enterprise Search is a very good solution and they should keep doing good work."
"The Attack Discovery feature helps to dig into incidents from where they occurred to determine how the incident originated and its source; it gives an entire path of attack propagation, showing when it started, what happened, and all events that took place to connect the entire cyber incident."
"Dashboard is very customizable."
"What I appreciate about Elastic Search is that the best features include the ability to search through very big documents and index and search through them really fast."
"While conducting A/B testing, Vespa seemed to be performing slightly better than Elasticsearch, especially in search relevancy within live production systems, and its performance was decent."
"The best feature to me is the LTR feature, the ranking feature to be specific."
"Vespa is very good and it improves our product, and we got more clients."
 

Cons

"They could simplify the Filebeat and Logstash configuration piece. There are a lot of manual steps on the operating system."
"I think the first area for improvement is pricing, as the cluster cost for Elastic Search is too high for me."
"Elastic Search should provide better guides for developers."
"Improving machine learning capabilities would be beneficial."
"It was not possible to use authentication three years back. You needed to buy the product's services for authentication."
"There are potential improvements based on our client feedback, like unifying the licensing cost structure."
"According to me, as far as I have seen, people will start moving from Elastic Search sooner or later. Why? Because it is expensive."
"New Relic could be more flexible, similar to Elasticsearch."
"The integration is actually a pain."
"Vespa has a considerable learning curve, making it challenging for most people to get into, and it is also expensive, which can deter startups or those with smaller budgets from using it."
"We want Vespa to implement some UI features so that we can visualize how our data goes and what embeddings it stores."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Elastic Search is open-source, but you need to pay for support, which is expensive."
"The tool is an open-source product."
"we are using a licensed version of the product."
"An X-Pack license is more affordable than Splunk."
"The pricing model is questionable and needs to be addressed because when you would like to have the security they charge per machine."
"ELK has been considered as an alternative to Splunk to reduce licensing costs."
"It can move from $10,000 US Dollars per year to any price based on how powerful you need the searches to be and the capacity in terms of storage and process."
"The solution is not expensive because users have the option of choosing the managed or the subscription model."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Energy/Utilities Company
8%
Wholesaler/Distributor
7%
 

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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Vespa?
The setup cost is definitely huge, and pricing is also steep. In terms of licensing, it seems generous for those who do not want to engage with Vespa's hosted services.
What needs improvement with Vespa?
Vespa definitely had its own set of challenges. It was really hard to get into initially, especially when I started implementing it in 2024 along with one junior employee, and the lack of documenta...
What is your primary use case for Vespa?
My main use case for Vespa is implementing it as the back-end search engine for an e-commerce site, where we have about six million products, or six million SKUs, that we are selling. I implemented...
 

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. Yahoo 2. Verizon Media 3. Oath 4. Tumblr 5. AOL 6. Huffington Post 7. TechCrunch 8. Engadget 9. MapQuest 10. Moviefone 11. Autoblog 12. AOL Mail 13. Yahoo Mail 14. Yahoo Finance 15. Yahoo Sports 16. Yahoo News 17. Yahoo Search 18. Yahoo Answers 19. Yahoo Messenger 20. Yahoo Groups 21. Yahoo Weather 22. Yahoo Maps 23. Yahoo Fantasy Sports 24. Yahoo TV 25. Yahoo Movies 26. Yahoo Music 27. Yahoo Style 28. Yahoo Beauty 29. Yahoo Travel 30. Yahoo Autos 31. Yahoo Health 32. Yahoo Tech
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Search vs. Vespa and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.