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Amazon AWS CloudSearch 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

Amazon AWS CloudSearch
Ranking in Search as a Service
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Elastic Search
Ranking in Search as a Service
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
78
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (9th), Vector Databases (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS CloudSearch is 7.0%, down from 10.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 19.3%, up from 10.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Search19.3%
Amazon AWS CloudSearch7.0%
Other73.7%
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

AmrIssa - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
Chandrakant Bharadwaj - PeerSpot reviewer
Boosted search efficiency through real-time querying and seamless indexing for high-volume product data
We are using AWS for our solutions. In AWS, we are heavily using Redshift and Glue. We focus more on vector searches and boosting the keywords, and all those features we are using heavily. In search, the key parameter that we boost up during indexing is essential. We self-implement Elastic Search in our e-commerce application. We are not currently doing a regex setup for RAG Playground, but there is a plan to do that. We are more into vector searches when it comes to how effectively the hybrid search capability meets our needs for combining traditional keyword and vector searches. Regarding the workflow, we are using the API for real-time inference because lots of data is being loaded at real-time on the application, and it is working well for us. I can definitely recommend Elastic Search to be used wherever you have consumer search capabilities needed in a large or scalable manner because it is very effective. I would rate Elastic Search an eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It will remain alive in the market. The solution will be stable in the market."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon AWS CloudSearch is the cloud aspect. I do not need to have the physical infrastructure, everything is in the cloud."
"I've found the solution to be very scalable."
"The best feature is its scalability in that Cloud is always on the fly."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"AWS CloudSearch's best features are good performance under high CPU and memory use, and ease of deployment and scaling."
"It is remarkably efficient and beneficial."
"It gives us the possibility to store and query this data and also do this efficiently and securely and without delays."
"It's a stable solution and we have not had any issues."
"The most valuable feature of Elastic Enterprise Search is the opportunity to search behind and between different logs."
"My favorite feature is the ease of use, particularly in how you integrate the agent; I've been using it since version 7, and we're on version 9 now, and I've seen the progress from using Beats to using the agent, making it so simple today to enroll a server with the Elastic Agent."
"The forced merge and forced resonate features reduce the data size increasing reliability."
"Decision-making has become much faster due to real-time data and quick responses."
"I like how it allows us to connect to Kafka and get this data in a document format very easily. Elasticsearch is very fast when you do text-based searches of documents. That area is very good, and the search is very good."
"The solution has good security features. I have been happy with the dashboards and interface."
 

Cons

"AWS CloudSearch's documentation isn't very clear. Also, the on-premise version of the solution is less stable than the cloud version."
"I would say that it needs to keep its cost competitive in the market, especially in comparison to other clouds."
"The price of the solution can be expensive."
"Amazon AWS CloudSearch is highly stable. However, the speed depends on your internet connection."
"Maybe they are common in Egypt, but you should make a request on Amazon to create a function to monitor CPU performance, memory, and files. It is very difficult in AWS. I would tell them it should be simple, just drag and drop. I think they could develop this option so we can drag and drop to monitor performance of the processor and memory."
"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."
"Security is a concern but they're working on it."
"A reboot should be enhanced."
"The price could be better. Kibana has some limitations in terms of the tablet to view event logs. I also have a high volume of data. On the initialization part, if you chose Kibana, you'll have some limitations. Kibana was primarily proposed as a log data reviewer to build applications to the viewer log data using Kibana. Then it became a virtualization tool, but it still has limitations from a developer's point of view."
"Enterprise scaling of what have been essentially separate, free open source software (FOSS) products has been a challenge, but the folks at Elastic have published new add-ons (X-Pack and ECE) to help large companies grow ELK to required scales."
"I would like to see more integration for the solution with different platforms."
"What they need is to be more transparent about the actual setup of the cluster and the deployment process."
"Elasticsearch should have simpler commands for window filtering."
"Performance improvement could come from skipping background refresh on search idle shards (which is already being addressed in the upcoming seventh version)."
"We'd like to see more integration in the future, especially around service desks or other ITSM tools."
"We see the need for some improvements with Elasticsearch. We would like the Elasticsearch package to include training lessons for our staff."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our license costs around $4,000 per month."
"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."
"There was no license needed to use this solution."
"Amazon AWS CloudSearch charging is based on how many resources you consume or and the solution is known to be a bit expensive."
"In comparison to IBM and Microsoft, the pricing is more favorable."
"We chose AWS because of its cost and stability."
"I'm not sure how much we pay a year. It might be around $30,000 a year."
"The tool is an open-source product."
"The premium license is expensive."
"The pricing model is questionable and needs to be addressed because when you would like to have the security they charge per machine."
"The solution is not expensive because users have the option of choosing the managed or the subscription model."
"The tool is not expensive. Its licensing costs are yearly."
"We are paying $1,500 a month to use the solution. If you want to have endpoint protection you need to pay more."
"The solution is free."
"This is a free, open source software (FOSS) tool, which means no cost on the front-end. There are no free lunches in this world though. Technical skill to implement and support are costly on the back-end with ELK, whether you train/hire internally or go for premium services from Elastic."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
University
9%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise38
 

Questions from the Community

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.
What needs improvement with Amazon AWS CloudSearch?
A reboot should be enhanced. There are issues with the VBC collection.
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?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Elastic Search is overall fairly straightforward.
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
We could benefit from refining the machine learning models that we currently use in Elastic Search, along with the possibility to integrate agents, intelligent artificial intelligence, form of agen...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

SmugMug
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 Amazon AWS CloudSearch vs. Elastic Search and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
872,706 professionals have used our research since 2012.