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Amazon AWS CloudSearch vs Azure Search vs Solr comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft are both solutions in the Search as a Service category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #7 with an average rating of 9.0, while Microsoft is ranked #5 with an average rating of 7.0. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 8.5% mindshare in SS, compared to Microsoft’s 13.0% mindshare. Additionally, 83% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 62% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Amazon AWS CloudSearch

Read 12 Amazon AWS CloudSearch reviews

849 Views
624 Comparison Views

83% willing to recommend

Azure Search

Read 8 Azure Search reviews

1,178 Views
746 Comparison Views

62% willing to recommend

Solr

Read 4 Solr reviews

604 Views
376 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon AWS CloudSearch

Azure Search

Solr

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Amazon AWS CloudSearch, Azure Search, and Solr based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Algolia and others in Search as a Service.

To learn more, read our detailed Search as a Service Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Search as a Service

June 2025

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Helped 860,632 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS CloudSearch is 8.5%, down from 10.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Azure Search is 13.0%, down from 13.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Solr is 6.4%, up from 6.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Search as a Service

Featured Reviews

AmrIssa

Chief Information officer at Mobica Advanced

A scalable and fully managed search service with diverse data type support and robust security

We use it as our hosting solution, serving as the backbone for our systems, which include Rubrik and SAP It is remarkably efficient and beneficial. A reboot should be enhanced. There are issues with the VBC collection. I have been working with it for four years. I would rate the stability ten…

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Mohamed Heikal

Responsable TUIC at MISSION LAIQUE FRANCAISE

Provides efficient documentation features, but its support services need improvement

We use the solution to link the Active Directory account to Office 365 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…

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reviewer1368636

Data Scientist at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

Good indexing and decent stability, but requires more documentation

The solution's grammar and syntax should be easier. It does take a little bit of effort to use and understand the solution. It would help us a lot if the solution offered up more documentation or tutorials to help with training or troubleshooting. MongoDB can realize more complex operations than Solr can. Solr should add some more complex operations to the database to at least bring it up to MondoDB's level of functionality. It would make it more competitive. There might be some compatibility issues between the data types within Solr. This needs to be improved. Solr has a schema that we have to load the schema as an HTML, or SML file. This usually needs to be done by our engineers. It should be easier to do without needing too much technical background.

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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 feature of Amazon AWS CloudSearch is its ability to receive data quickly. You can access your data easily in a short time."

"The quality of the solution is good."

"CDN service reduces latency when accessing our web application."

"Document indexing, text-based search API, and Geospatial searches are all good features."

"It will remain alive in the market. The solution will be stable in the market."

"The initial setup is straightforward."

"It's the best solution for any company. It has a hosting ERP system for any task. AWS is stable. AWS is more flexible and its elastic concept is a new concept. AWS is also very secure. It has many layers of security, like hardware security and software security. This is a big issue."

"AWS CloudSearch's best features are good performance under high CPU and memory use, and ease of deployment and scaling."

More Amazon AWS CloudSearch pros

"It provides good access capabilities to various platforms."

"The search functionality time has been reduced to a few milliseconds."

"The customer engagement was good."

"Creates indexers to get data from different data sources."

"Azure Search is well-documented, making it easy to understand and implement."

"Offers a tremendous amount of flexibility and scalability when integrating with applications."

"The product is extremely configurable, allowing you to customize the search experience to suit your needs."

"The product is pretty resilient."

More Azure Search pros

"Sharding data, Faceting, Hit Highlighting, parent-child Block Join and Grouping, and multi-mode platform are all valuable features."

"It has improved our search ranking, relevancy, search performance, and user retention."

"One of the best aspects of the solution is the indexing. It's already indexed to all the fields in the category. We don't need to spend so much extra effort to do the indexing. It's great."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to perform a natural language search."

Cons

"Regarding the period of propagation on CDN servers, sometimes we update photos or files and we don't see the update instantly. We need to wait for sometime."

"A reboot should be enhanced."

"I do not have any suggestions for improvements at this time."

"Index cleanup is sometimes painful. No easy way to clean indexes or a bulk of documents. Full indexing or regeneration of entire indexes sometimes gets stuck. In one instance, we had to delete the entire index and re-create it."

"Amazon AWS CloudSearch is highly stable. However, the speed depends on your internet connection."

"We'd like to see more database features."

"Latlon data type only supports single value per document. All other types support multiple values. We faced issues with this because we had scenarios where, for each document, we needed to store multiple latlon values for different geographical locations."

"The price of the solution can be expensive."

More Amazon AWS CloudSearch cons

"The initial setup is not as easy as it should be."

"For availability, expanding its use to all Azure datacenters would be helpful in increasing awareness and usage of the product."

"The solution's stability could be better."

"The pricing is room for improvement."

"For SDKs, Azure Search currently offers solutions for .NET and Python. Additional platforms would be welcomed, especially native iOS and Android solutions for mobile development."

"They should add an API for third-party vendors, like a security operating center or reporting system, that would be a big improvement."

"It would be good if the site found a better way to filter things based on subscription."

"Adding items to Azure Search using its .NET APIs sometimes throws exceptions."

More Azure Search cons

"SolrCloud stability, indexing and commit speed, and real-time Indexing need improvement."

"Encountered issues with both master-slave and SolrCloud. Indexing and serving traffic from same collection has very poor performance. Some components are slow for searching."

"With increased sharding, performance degrades. Merger, when present, is a bottle-neck. Peer-to-peer sync has issues in SolrCloud when index is incrementally updated."

"The performance for this solution, in terms of queries, could be improved."

"It does take a little bit of effort to use and understand the solution. It would help us a lot if the solution offered up more documentation or tutorials to help with training or troubleshooting."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our license costs around $4,000 per month."

"In comparison to IBM and Microsoft, the pricing is more favorable."

"We chose AWS because of its cost and stability."

"There was no license needed to use this solution."

"On a scale of one to ten, where one point is cheap, and ten points are expensive, I rate the pricing as medium or reasonable."

"I'm not sure how much we pay a year. It might be around $30,000 a year."

"Amazon AWS CloudSearch charging is based on how many resources you consume or and the solution is known to be a bit expensive."

"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, where one is the low price, and ten is the high price."

"The cost is comparable."

"The solution is affordable."

"I think the solution's pricing is ok compared to other cloud devices."

"For the actual costs, I encourage users to view the pricing page on the Azure site for details."

"When telling people about the product, I always encourage them to set up a new service using the free pricing tier. This allows them to learn about the product and its capabilities in a risk-free environment. Depending on their needs, the free tier may be suitable for their projects, however enterprise applications will most likely required a higher, paid tier."

"The only costs in addition to the standard licensing fees are related to the hardware, depending on whether it is cloud-based, or on-premise."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

22%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

10%

University

Computer Software Company

23%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Retailer

Government

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon AWS CloudSearch?

It is remarkably efficient and beneficial.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon AWS CloudSearch?

In comparison to IBM and Microsoft, the pricing is more favorable. I would rate it eight out of ten.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon AWS CloudSearch?

A reboot should be enhanced. There are issues with the VBC collection.

See all answers

What do you like most about Azure Search?

The product is pretty resilient.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Azure Search?

The after-hour services are slow. It could be better.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Azure Search?

We use the solution to link the Active Directory account to Office 365.

See all answers

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Comparisons

Algolia vs Amazon AWS CloudSearch

Compared 34% of the time

Elastic Search vs Amazon AWS CloudSearch

Compared 25% of the time

Amazon Athena vs Amazon AWS CloudSearch

Compared 9% of the time

Glean vs Amazon AWS CloudSearch

Compared 7% of the time

Amazon Kendra vs Amazon AWS CloudSearch

Compared 6% of the time

More Amazon AWS CloudSearch Competitors

Amazon Kendra vs Azure Search

Compared 47% of the time

Elastic Search vs Azure Search

Compared 32% of the time

Algolia vs Azure Search

Compared 5% of the time

Xapien vs Azure Search

Compared 5% of the time

More Azure Search Competitors

Elastic Search vs Solr

Compared 30% of the time

Algolia vs Solr

Compared 19% of the time

Amazon Kendra vs Solr

Compared 11% of the time

More Solr Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon AWS CloudSearch

July 2025

Download Amazon AWS CloudSearch product report

Buyer's Guide

Search as a Service

June 2025

Download Azure Search product report

Buyer's Guide

Search as a Service

June 2025

Download Solr product report

Overview

Amazon CloudSearch is a managed service in the AWS Cloud that makes it simple and cost-effective to set up, manage, and scale a search solution for your website or application.
Amazon CloudSearch supports 34 languages and popular search features such as highlighting, autocomplete, and geospatial search. With Amazon CloudSearch, you can quickly add rich search capabilities to your website or application. You don't need to become a search expert or worry about hardware provisioning, setup, and maintenance. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can create a search domain and upload the data that you want to make searchable, and Amazon CloudSearch will automatically provision the required resources and deploy a highly tuned search index.

You can easily change your search parameters, fine tune search relevance, and apply new settings at any time. As your volume of data and traffic fluctuates, Amazon CloudSearch seamlessly scales to meet your needs.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Azure Search is a search-as-a-service cloud solution that gives developers APIs and tools for adding a rich search experience over your data in web, mobile, and enterprise applications. Functionality is exposed through a simple REST API or .NET SDK that masks the inherent complexity of search technology. In addition to APIs, the Azure portal provides administration and prototyping support. Infrastructure and availability are managed by Microsoft.

Microsoft

Solr is highly reliable, scalable and fault tolerant, providing distributed indexing, replication and load-balanced querying, automated failover and recovery, centralized configuration and more. Solr powers the search and navigation features of many of the world's largest internet sites.

Apache

Sample Customers

SmugMug

XOMNI, Real Madrid C.F., Weichert Realtors, JLL, NAV CANADA, Medihoo, autoTrader Corporation, Gjirafa

eHarmony, Sears, StubHub, Best Buy, Instagram, Netflix, Disney, AT&T, eBay, AOL, Bloomberg, Comcast, Ticketmaster, Travelocity, MTV Networks

Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Algolia and others in Search as a Service. Updated: June 2025.

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860,632 professionals have used our research since 2012.