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Elastic Search vs Vespa 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
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
99
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (5th), Search as a Service (1st)
Vespa
Ranking in Vector Databases
20th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.3
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (20th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 4.7%, down from 4.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Vespa is 2.3%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Elastic Search4.7%
Vespa2.3%
Other93.0%
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

"I think that Elasticsearch is a good product and cheaper than Splunk."
"It provides deep visibility into your cloud and distributed applications, from microservices to serverless architectures. It quickly identifies and resolves the root causes of issues, like gaining visibility into all the cloud-based and on-prem applications."
"Aggregation is faster than querying directly from a database, like Postgres or Vertica, and it's much faster if I want to do aggregation, which allows me to store logs and find anomalies effectively."
"Elastic Search is the perfect tool for scalability."
"I would recommend Elastic Search to other people who want to have fast search in their applications."
"I am impressed with the product's Logstash. The tool is fast and customizable. You can build beautiful dashboards with it. It is useful and reliable."
"The AI-based attribute tagging is a valuable feature."
"I have found the sort capability of Elastic very useful for allowing us to find the information we need very quickly."
"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 most outstanding features and characteristics of Vespa include an architecture that lets you focus on implementing features, the function that automatically manages sharding and shards is excellent, and the flexibility of the server cluster and infrastructure architecture is outstanding."
"Vespa is very good and it improves our product, and we got more clients."
"The best feature to me is the LTR feature, the ranking feature to be specific."
 

Cons

"Something that could be improved is better integrations with Cortex and QRadar, for example."
"The solution has quite a steep learning curve. The usability and general user-friendliness could be improved."
"It was not possible to use authentication three years back. You needed to buy the product's services for authentication."
"Both the graph feature and the reporting feature are a little bit lacking. The alerting also needs to be improved."
"While integrating with tools like agents for ingesting data from sources like firewalls is valuable, I believe prioritizing improvements to the core product would be more beneficial."
"Elastic Search should provide better guides for developers."
"The deployment was a struggle as I faced challenges with bash commands and understanding how to run things on my system."
"Performance improvement could come from skipping background refresh on search idle shards (which is already being addressed in the upcoming seventh version)."
"The integration is actually a pain."
"We want Vespa to implement some UI features so that we can visualize how our data goes and what embeddings it stores."
"There were aspects of Vespa that needed improvement, such as if a monitoring dashboard were provided—and not only the monitoring dashboard, but also related supplementary tools for the administrative aspects—that would be better."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is free."
"We are using the Community Edition because Elasticsearch's licensing model is not flexible or suitable for us. They ask for an annual subscription. We also got the development consultancy from Elasticsearch for 60 days or something like that, but they were just trying to do the same trick. That's why we didn't purchase it. We are just using the Community Edition."
"The price of Elasticsearch is fair. It is a more expensive solution, like QRadar. The price for Elasticsearch is not much more than other solutions we have."
"I rate Elastic Search's pricing an eight out of ten."
"We use the free version for some logs, but not extensive use."
"Although the ELK Elasticsearch software is open-source, we buy the hardware."
"An X-Pack license is more affordable than Splunk."
"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
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business40
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise49
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ELK Elasticsearch?
Elastic Search is easy to use in Azure cloud. Mostly, my full company uses Azure cloud, so it is easy to use. Cost-wise, my company found Elastic Search is good. Cost matters. Based on cost and use...
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
The initial configuration could be easier; at first, the learning curve is a little high, and over time, it becomes easier. For me, the initial configuration might be improved.
What is your primary use case for ELK Elasticsearch?
We use Elastic Search for a research application based on paper study, and the primary usage is for indexing the data and then functioning in a similar way to an e-commerce search bar.
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
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