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Algolia vs Elastic Search 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

Algolia
Ranking in Search as a Service
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Elastic Search
Ranking in Search as a Service
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
83
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (6th), Vector Databases (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Algolia is 9.8%, up from 8.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 18.5%, up from 13.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Search18.5%
Algolia9.8%
Other71.7%
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

Zaid bin junaid  - PeerSpot reviewer
Growth and Product Manager at Flash.co
Navigation has needed simplification while AI search has delivered faster, more relevant answers
Algolia has multiple features, but the one I love most is the AI-powered relevance, which helps us search anything within our systems. It ensures that search results are optimized using accuracy and personalization for our organization. The second feature I value is real-time indexing, which provides instant updates and ensures that search results reflect the latest content and inventory. Additionally, Algolia tailors search based on user behavior. For example, as a user, it tailors the behavior by giving preferences and context. It works on LLM models, which is the main reason they are able to personalize behavior. Another feature I appreciate is the ability to monitor search performance and conversion metrics. The reason Algolia's AI-powered relevance and real-time indexing have made a difference is that the features provided have given us an outstanding service. It works extremely well with no downtime, no defects, and no bugs. Whatever we search for, it provides instant results. That is why we prefer them over others.
MichaelSmith9 - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Unified search has powered feature‑driven research with minimal maintenance overhead
We haven't had the opportunity to use the hybrid search with Elastic Search yet. I think there's a place for it in our long-term solution, but we're not quite there yet. We haven't yet used any AI features built into Elastic Search. To do what we want to do with Elastic Search, the queries can get complex and require a fuller understanding of the DSL. Once we start to build that understanding, it's another muscle we have, so it's not a bad thing, but it just takes a while to get up and running with expertise for our engineers. It's not hard to learn how to use more complex things in Elastic Search; it's just a challenge we're going to face.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We were working with search products, brands, and different attributes specific to the product; it's faster and easier. The implementation is easy."
"It's scalable. It can be scaled massively."
"It has many fine-tuning configurations. Essentially, every single piece of information you pass through it is a free document you can tailor."
"Algolia provides some cool functionalities like filtering, indexing, and searching."
"The tool is easy to use, but you need to know how it works."
"The tool is worth the money, and I have seen an ROI."
"Since Algolia is a SaaS solution, we didn't have to maintain servers, look at the indexes, and monitor services."
"The Algolia solution really helped us to improve our conversion rate and click through rate."
"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 most valuable feature of Elastic Enterprise Search is the opportunity to search behind and between different logs."
"Elastic Search makes handling large data volumes efficient and supports complex search operations."
"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."
"The products comes with REST APIs."
"You have dashboards, it is visual, there are maps, you can create canvases. It's more visual than anything that I've ever used."
"The solution is quite scalable and this is one of its advantages."
"Elastic Search is very quick when handling a large volume of data."
 

Cons

"Joining is quite complex."
"The high cost of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"Algolia is not adopted that much, and it would be great if it were made more popular."
"The documentation is not beginner-friendly."
"The deployment could be easier for beginners."
"When indexing the products, one may face some issues with the tool."
"Algolia provides a certification, which is pretty basic, and I think it can be improved in terms of a bit more detail and more elaborative content."
"The documentation for the service is not as good as it could be."
"Could have more open source tools and testing."
"Improving machine learning capabilities would be beneficial."
"The documentation for Elastic Search can be challenging if you're not already familiar with the platform."
"Pagination in Elastic Search is very slow."
"The pricing of this product needs to be more clear because I cannot understand it when I review the website."
"We have an issue with the volume of data that we can handle."
"The setup is somewhat complicated due to multiple dependencies and relations with different systems."
"There are a lot of manual steps on the operating system. It could be simplified in the user interface."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are currently on a contract with Algolia for licensing and price."
"For any developer starting out, it is worth it."
"I have heard that Algolia is an expensive solution."
"The product is cheap."
"In terms of the cost of Algolia, the tool is really expensive for us in Brazil since it comes to about half a million dollars."
"Algolia is a cool, super-easy-to-use, and affordable tool."
"The solution is affordable."
"We are using the open-sourced version."
"The price could be better."
"I rate Elastic Search's pricing an eight out of ten."
"The cost varies based on factors like usage volume, network load, data storage size, and service utilization. If your usage isn't too extensive, the cost will be lower."
"The tool is not expensive. Its licensing costs are yearly."
"The price of Elastic Enterprise is very, very competitive."
"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
Comms Service Provider
14%
Performing Arts
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
University
8%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise41
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Algolia?
The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Algolia are based on a pay-as-you-go model, which is very efficient. The costs are very transparent and have detailed breakdowns for any kind of queries c...
What needs improvement with Algolia?
Algolia provides good value for money. However, personally, I feel the UI is a bit difficult to understand and could be more user-centric. The navigation part of Algolia is different from other too...
What is your primary use case for Algolia?
Algolia is used in my organization primarily for AI search to enhance product search for recommendations. It helps us support our knowledge bases, particularly Confluence, and maximizes the outcome...
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?
Elastic Search's pricing totally depends on the server. Managed services from AWS are used, and we have worked on a self-managed Elastic Search cluster. On the AWS side, it is very expensive becaus...
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
Elastic Search has an annoying limitation regarding page size. It has a specific limit for queries on Elastic Search, and the default is ten thousand, and we can increase it. However, after increas...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Birchbox, Twitch, Lacoste, Stripe, WW, Medium, Cousera, National Geographic, Zendesk, Magento
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.
Find out what your peers are saying about Algolia vs. Elastic Search and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,711 professionals have used our research since 2012.