Azure AI Search is a cloud-based service offering flexible, user-friendly search with features like custom scoring, text analyzers, and seamless integration, simplifying data infrastructure.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| Azure AI Search | 12.5% |
| Elastic Search | 15.3% |
| Amazon OpenSearch Service | 13.3% |
| Other | 58.9% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 3 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 3 |
| Large Enterprise | 5 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 88 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 35 |
| Large Enterprise | 101 |
Azure AI Search delivers configurable features such as custom scoring and synonym mapping, supporting broad access that simplifies infrastructure requirements. Users value its comprehensive documentation, stable search syntax, and resilience comparable to Elasticsearch. Automation through blob storage or SQL tables facilitates effortless full-text search and field-specific indexing, enhancing performance. While room for improvement exists, notably in expanding SDK support beyond .NET and Python and refining interface and documentation, Azure AI Search is preferred for applications in the tech space for its ease of setup, speed, and integration capabilities.
What are its key features?In the tech industry, Azure AI Search is implemented for managing accounts, integrating with applications, and addressing security issues, enhancing scalability with Active Directory syncing and Office 365 linking. Users leverage it for efficient log searching, VM identification, and handling vector search queries, appreciating its speed and integration support.
XOMNI, Real Madrid C.F., Weichert Realtors, JLL, NAV CANADA, Medihoo, autoTrader Corporation, Gjirafa
| Author info | Rating | Review Summary |
|---|---|---|
| AI Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees | 4.5 | I use Azure AI Search for RAG workflows, valuing its easy document handling, reliability, and cost savings. It's stable, scalable, and 99% accurate, though I wish for better agent integration to expand its limited use cases. |
| Software Architect at a financial services firm with 1-10 employees | 3.5 | I value Azure AI Search's automated indexing and good scalability. However, its semantic search is disappointing, customer support poor, and setup complex. High costs also lead me to explore ChromaDB and Cosmos DB as alternatives. |
| Data Analyst at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees | 4.5 | I use Azure AI Search for document indexing and chatbots, finding it delivers significant time savings and automation. Its features are valuable, though I'd appreciate better Azure Blob Storage compatibility and more interface tutorials. |
| Data Analyst at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees | 4.0 | I primarily use Azure AI Search for RAG systems, finding its integration with Azure OpenAI and Blob Storage very valuable, saving significant time. While stable and scalable, the UI/UX and fragmented documentation could improve. Overall, I rate it an eight. |
| Director, Domain Architect at UBS Financial | 4.0 | I use Azure Search for faceted and full-text search, benefiting from its stable performance and comprehensive documentation. While it mirrors Elasticsearch's features effectively, pricing and performance could improve. Microsoft Azure's approach seems more structured compared to Elasticsearch. |
| Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Diebold Nixdorf | 3.0 | I primarily use Azure Search for log and VM searches by name or subscription. While customer engagement and API documentation are strong, search patterns can be intuitive. Improvements could include better filtering and prebuilt views without complicating the process. |
| Engagement Lead at DCM infotech | 4.0 | In my experience with Azure Search, its resilience stands out, despite slow after-hour services. Compared to AWS, Azure offers more stability, which is crucial for us. Although there's room for improvement, Azure remains our preferred choice for stability. |
| Responsable TUIC at MISSION LAIQUE FRANCAISE | 2.5 | I use Azure Search mainly to link Active Directory with Office 365, finding Word, Excel, and documentation features most valuable. However, the solution's stability and support need improvement. I haven't evaluated or used other solutions. |
| Chief Executive Officer at Cybrella | 4.0 | I use Azure Search for cloud security, finding it flexible, agile, and stable with easy setup. I wish it had a third-party API. I'd rate it an eight out of ten. |
| Cybersecurity Instructor at Gwinnett Technical College | 3.0 | I find Azure Search offers good access capabilities, but its UI, complex setup, and poor documentation need significant improvement. While stability is okay, customer support is inconsistent. Overall, I rate it a six out of ten. |
My main use case for Azure AI Search is building RAG workflows which are useful for client work.
I used Azure AI Search in finding documents about a user manual in which the problem statement was if a user wants to search something, then he needs to go to the application and then he could search that.
I have used Azure AI Search primarily for this purpose only.
Azure AI Search has positively impacted my organization by reducing the turnaround time for developing applications and for setting up vector databases and then for consuming other RAG applications as well.
The turnaround time has improved, and it saved us approximately 10% of our time.
In my experience, the best features Azure AI Search offers are that it is very easy to upload documents and they can obviously be very agile and we can query upon these documents very easily.
When I say it is easy to upload and query documents, it makes the application more reliable in the case that if we have a certain study or certain use case wherein just that PDF or just those amount of information will be used and not the entire thing, so the user can just go quickly and search for that documentation.
I think it is fully integrated with Azure and we use Azure primarily for our primary cloud platform, so that helps very much in integrating and in maintaining one service provider.
Regarding Azure AI Search's AI capabilities, it provides good security in terms of reliability and scalability as well, so there are no concerns for it regarding those issues.
Regarding Azure AI Search's AI capabilities, it is accurate and reliable 99% of the time.
I think Azure AI Search can be improved by implementing it with the agents as well, and I think that their agent integration is something they could work upon or they can improve it very easily or without managing anything, but apart from that, it is building basic functionalities of RAG, but if that would be expanded to agents as well, then that would be very useful.
I think the only the agent part needs to be worked upon, and apart from that, all the things are pretty good.
I have been using Azure AI Search for the past one year.
Azure AI Search is stable.
It is pretty much scalable because it is a cloud platform, so it does have good scalability.
I have not contacted customer support till date.
Before Azure AI Search, I was exploring about the open source Qdrant source, but it was not very enterprise-friendly, I would say, so that is why we switched to Azure.
I have seen a return on investment, as it reduced the deployment costs of our vector database which needs to be deployed for our instances, for example, it could be Milvus, it could be Qdrant, so it saved us cost.
It reduced approximately by 30%.
My experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it was easy, as our organization did set it up earlier, so the setup was not in my hands, but from a pricing point of view or from an implementation point of view, it is a very good product.
Before choosing Azure AI Search, I evaluated other options, and they were mostly in the categories of Qdrant and Milvus before selecting Azure AI Search.
On a scale of 1 to 10, I rate Azure AI Search a nine.
I chose a nine for Azure AI Search primarily because of the agents and the use cases are very limited, I would say to RAG as of now.
Azure AI Search is deployed in my organization on our self-hosting private cloud.
I primarily use Azure for our private cloud deployment.
My advice to others looking into using Azure AI Search is that it is good as of the use cases which it provides.
My main use case for Azure AI Search is the index for the customization portal that they have. It combines data sources, indexers, and skill sets, making it a well-developed component.
For example, we needed to process around 100,000s of PDF documents using the customization portal. Previously, we developed this manually, investing a lot of time searching for information and often could not find the latest document versions. We built a chatbot based on those documents that can answer questions around those PDFs. It combines components from Azure Storage to Azure AI Search until finally generating the answer.
Azure AI Search has impacted my organization positively with overall time saving and low costs as the main outputs that we get after using it. Additionally, handling many tasks at the same time could be a potential benefit from the tool.
Regarding time savings, I can share that investing more than two hours per document, we can now process it within five to ten minutes approximately.
We have seen a return on investment with Azure AI Search, as fewer employees are needed since the work is now automated rather than done manually.
The best features Azure AI Search offers are the components that the API has. It is very convenient in that it is interoperable with other tools inside the portal. For example, role-based access control, private endpoints, and managed identities are valuable features.
I rely on building endpoints like private endpoints in my day-to-day work with Azure AI Search. Even though I use this for my own case, I need to deliver something for my company, and the fact that I can translate this into endpoints is very convenient.
The combination with direct properties or the skill set that lets you use collections of AI skills during indexing to enrich content with Azure AI Search performs very well with the tool.
The configuration of the search indexer with Azure AI Search stands out to me because it lets you extract document content very extensively and carefully.
Azure AI Search could be improved regarding compatibility with Azure Blob Storage in order to keep the prompts and everything that I am using for building the tool safe.
Regarding needed improvements, the interface could be better with more tutorials around that part.
I have been using Azure AI Search for about a year now.
Azure AI Search has been stable so far.
Azure AI Search is very scalable if you process more than 100,000 documents when you compare it to processing 500 documents.
The customer support for Azure AI Search has been very good. I do not have complaints.
I would rate the customer support for Azure AI Search overall an eight. I have not had that many issues.
This is the first solution that we are using regarding AI.
We went with Azure AI Search from the beginning and did not evaluate other options.
The advice I would give to others looking into using Azure AI Search is to first watch the tutorials and seek information on the website, as it is very reliable.
Overall, Azure AI Search is a great tool and I would definitely recommend it. I would rate this review a nine.
My main use case for Azure AI Search is primarily the RAG, Retrieval-Augmented Generation system, or Copilot, and I think it's one of the stronger services out there. The main use case I have with Azure AI Search is actually building custom datasets for my use cases. With the RAG systems, I'm able to feed the system with all the information I have inside my organization, and then this information is ready to be analyzed on different platforms.
The best features Azure AI Search offers include the work that it does with Azure OpenAI, which is great, and besides that, the native integration with Blob Storage, as well as the authentication services that they offer, is actually pretty good.
Overall, the native integration with Blob Storage and the certification services help me in my daily work by offering qualitative and quantitative metrics now, in the sense that I'm doing my work easier than before.
Azure AI Search has positively impacted my organization in metrics, as instead of doing manual database customization, I can just type the prompt and Azure AI Search does this kind of work for me.
Since using Azure AI Search, time saving will be the main differentiator among other types of tools I've tried before, and it's also a very holistic tool, so it covers many use cases.
Azure AI Search could be improved primarily because the UX and UI could be a little bit more intuitive for persons since the learning curve could be a little bit high.
The needed improvements for Azure AI Search include that while the Microsoft documentation is pretty comprehensive, it could be fragmented to get a deeper understanding about the tools.
I've been using Azure AI Search for over one year, but mostly leaning toward two years now.
Azure AI Search is stable, as most of the time the tool is very stable, and I haven't seen any time that the system went down.
Azure AI Search's scalability is good, as long as I have the need to actually use that, but at the moment, it's going great.
The customer support for Azure AI Search is pretty comprehensive, and if I have any extra doubts, I just use the chat.
From one to ten, I would rate the customer support for Azure AI Search an eight.
We just use another smaller solution, so it's not big, and I didn't previously use a different solution before Azure AI Search.
I cannot think of a specific ROI metric for Azure AI Search, but it would be a good idea to give more free tiers to customers so they could test out the end components.
I'm not part of the financial decisions regarding Azure AI Search, and I did do the analysis of how the tool can actually be a saving to us.
There are many things to think about the return on investment, but usability again is the one thing I would say.
We evaluated a couple of options from the market before choosing Azure AI Search, but I cannot reveal the names of those because of conflict of interest, though I think Azure is going great.
My advice to others looking into using Azure AI Search is not to be scared of the learning curve, as it's very easy if you know how to do prompts or anything surrounding this topic, and it could be great—you could benefit a lot from the tool. I would keep insisting on the usability aspect as an important consideration. I would rate this review an eight overall.
We use it for standard faceted search and full-text search. So it's a regular search engine for the tech space, similar to Elasticsearch. Azure Search is a newer Microsoft solution that is well-documented, so we chose to use it.
Azure Search is well-documented, and it just works. The search syntax in the app is very stable, and the performance is good.
Azure Search has everything I would expect from Elasticsearch, so it works well for generic full-text search. I wouldn't use it for logging or other specific solutions that require Cassandra or similar databases.
The pricing is room for improvement. However, I assume they will once the cloud providers start making money.
Moreover, from a performance perspective, there is some room for improvement.
I have been using Azure Search for three years.
It is a very stable solution.
So far, I haven't found any limitations. It might be less scalable than Elasticsearch, but I haven't tested its limits yet.
Azure Search is entirely sufficient for the amount of information we index. Overall, I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. The end-user community is around 50,000. Azure Secure is used on a daily basis in our company.
As a cloud-based solution, the technical support mainly comes from the developer community of Microsoft, which is quite helpful. We don't have to talk to Microsoft for any help because the good documentation has enabled us to solve most issues ourselves.
Positive
I have used Elasticsearch. Elastic is the older solution, so it tends to be not as well-documented or structured in the documentation as the Microsoft solution.
The APe Syntax is somewhat convoluted because it's older. Whereas Microsoft had the opportunity to do something correctly from day one.
The initial setup is pretty straightforward; it's relatively simple like you would expect from a cloud-based provider.
Azure Search is a service provided by Azure. You can sign up for it on the Azure portal, and it's just a click away to get it up and running. So, the installation only takes a few seconds of your time, and it's already up and running.
Additionally, you have to set up your index to define the fields and other parameters for what you want to search on.
I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, where one is the low price, and ten is the high price. All of the cloud providers want to charge you as much as possible without having you switch back to an on-premises solution. They want to keep you in the cloud but want to charge you as much as possible.
So, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, they all have the same business model.
I would tend to use all the solutions that are based on open-source technology rather than Microsoft-specific tools. Not all of the solutions inside Azure are based on open-source technology. Some are based on Microsoft-specific tools that Microsoft developed. And I would tend to stay away from those because they get you into a lock-in situation. Meaning that if one day you realize that Microsoft is too expensive and you want to move to an Amazon or Google cloud provider, you might have an expensive switch over to a solution that you locked yourself in, for example, if you are using Cosmos DB, that's a very Microsoft specific solution.
Azure has quite a few tools that are Microsoft-only, so I would advise staying away from those.
Overall, I would rate Azure Search an eight out of ten because , from a performance perspective, there is some room for improvement.
I use the solution mainly to search the logs and to search for VMs by their names or subscription names. I wouldn't rate it great since the logs are a bit complicated.
The solution was really pretty good. The customer engagement was good. The presented documentation or exposure to the APIs to get the data is also pretty good.
The solution's search patterns are a bit intuitive. It would be good if the site found a better way to filter things based on subscription. Also, it can work on giving a good prebuilt view, like what we get during the live stage.
The stability of Azure Search is good. We just experienced two or three big outages in a year or so. Apart from those instances, the stability of the solution is good.
I would rate Azure Search an eight to nine out of ten regarding scalability. The scalability of Azure Search is very good. As a platform, Microsoft Azure is very good. We have never seen scalability issues. We have many users using this solution at the moment.
The technical support is pretty straightforward based on the issue. Also, the user interface to contact technical support is justified and good.
I think the solution's pricing is okay compared to other cloud devices.
I am an Azure Search customer with an enterprise agreement, but not a premium one.
I would definitely recommend using Azure Search, depending on your infrastructure.
Overall, I rate Azure Search a six out of ten.
We had many vendors for managing applications. Now, we have reduced the infrastructure. It has reduced our costs.
The product is pretty resilient.
The after-hour services are slow. It could be better.
I have been using the solution for one year.
The tool’s stability is pretty good. I haven’t experienced any issues with stability. I rate the stability a nine and a half out of ten.
The tool is scalable.
The support is good. We are absolutely fine with the support provided.
Positive
We also use AWS. The services that we are using are more stable in Azure. We need stability, and Azure is a very stable solution.
The initial setup was pretty smooth. We deployed the tool in phases. Initially, we did a few applications from the lower environment. It took us a couple of months.
The cost is comparable.
Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.
The solution's most valuable features are Word, Excel, and documentation.
The solution's stability and support could be better.
We have been using the solution for three to four years.
I rate the solution's stability a six out of ten. It needs improvement.
I rate the solution's scalability a seven out of ten. We have approximately 800 users in our organization.
The solution's technical support team needs improvement.
Negative
The solution's initial setup is straightforward. I rate the process an eight out of ten. It takes an hour or two to complete.
I rate the solution's pricing a four out of ten. It is affordable.
It is a good solution. I rate it a five out of ten. It should be better and more accessible in terms of support services.
We use Azure Search for security-related issues. We are trying to figure out everything that's related to security events occurring in the Cloud.
We are a small company, less than 10 people. About three of us use Azure Search.
In general, the amount of flexibility and agility is really assuring. Also, the UI is very friendly, we used it quite easily.
They should add an API for third-party vendors, like a security operating center or reporting system, that would be a big improvement.
I have been using Azure Search for one year.
Azure Search is stable. It works and it's quick. So far, we haven't experienced any stability issues.
I haven't used Azure's support, but Microsoft's technical support is great. The two times that I contacted them, They were very professional and helpful.
Azure Search came as an added value when we purchased a full Microsoft license. We were then given the opportunity to switch to Azure so we decided to work with it.
The initial setup was quite straightforward; it was very easy.
We hired a freelance IT consultant, to help us with the implementation.
Azure Search provides plenty of benefits for business teams and sales teams. As it's a CLM system, it helps you find everything related to specific customers and deals.
From an implementation aspect, you need to know what kind of data you have, and where is it stored. We're a small company so it was very easy to map and locate the data, etc. If you work for a large enterprise, data location should be the first stage before implementing Azure Search — you need to know exactly where the data is stored.
On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.
Mainly just to deal with accounts, secondary platforms, or to sync the AD (Active Directory).
The broad access capability is probably the most valuable feature. It provides access with hardly any physical infrastructure.
I would definitely say that the user interface could be improved, for sure. Azure Search could stand to be more user-friendly in general from the initial setup on.
The documentation for the setup should be simplified and have more exacting detail. I do not think it is well executed and as helpful as it should be.
We have been using Azure Search for about two or three years now.
The stability of the product is okay. It is not too bad from that standpoint. It can hold up under load.
We have not had the need to explore the capabilities for scaling the use of the product. It is meeting our needs currently. There are not any scalability limitations that I am aware of.
I have had experience with Azure technical support. Sometimes they do a really good job and sometimes it is hard to reach them or get a quicker response. On a scale of one to ten, I think I could probably give the tech support only a six. It is not completely disappointing and not as good as it might be.
From my experience, the setup is a little bit complex. Azure seems to be lacking somewhat in the instructions and documentation. They need better instruction for it, mainly. If it was a little bit more intuitive and simpler to install without additional instruction, they would not need better documentation.
My advice to others considering this product is to just do your research beforehand. Know what you want and what you are getting yourself into as far as the product capabilities. You probably want to try the product as a test to see how it works for you.
On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Azure Search as probably a six-out-of-ten.
