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Amazon OpenSearch Service vs Elastic Search vs Solr 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:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon OpenSearch Service is 9.6%, down from 10.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 18.3%, up from 14.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Solr is 4.9%, down from 6.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Search18.3%
Amazon OpenSearch Service9.6%
Solr4.9%
Other67.2%
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

Md. Shahariar Hossen - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at Cefalo
Event tracking has become smoother and data analytics provide clear insights for user actions
Amazon OpenSearch Service is not providing the processing feature directly. From Amazon OpenSearch Service, we are actually maintaining the AWS SQS, the queue service, which is responsible for providing information about what data has to be modified. So using that SQS, we're actually providing it, but we're not directly using Amazon OpenSearch Service for keeping data to other data pipeline thing. So far we didn't use it for any machine learning purposes, but in future, we have plans to extend or implement this feature. Since AWS itself is secure and Amazon OpenSearch Service is a part of this entire ecosystem, it becomes much easier for security purposes. From the validation point of view, Amazon OpenSearch Service itself provides easy to communicate APIs and up-to-date documents, which is much beneficial. For example, if I'm missing anything, I can directly go and check the documentation. That is actually much easier. I would rate it as really good so far. It's much faster. For our local machine, we can also use a kind of replica of Amazon OpenSearch Service just for development purposes. That is another good feature. I would say for the encryption thing and also the user access control management, it's much faster. For some of these hashing algorithms, it also worked really well so far. To be honest, I didn't find any places where it can be improved. However, I think they could provide more abstraction. For example, still for searching, we have to write down the queries in a specific manner, such as for a specific JSON structure or in a specific way. Otherwise, they don't provide us the actual results. For at least this purpose, I think abstraction could be a bit easier or a bit improved. Other than that, right now there is the age of AI, so some kind of prompting could also work, but I'm not sure how it could be integrated. As a user, lower prices or reasonable pricing is always better. Those can be improved as well. However, it is good that most of the services including Amazon OpenSearch Service actually provide pay as you go pricing. So if there were a bit lower version or a bit less payment methodology, it might be much better.
Vaibhav Shukla - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at Agoda
Search performance has transformed large-scale intent discovery and hybrid query handling
While Elastic Search is a good product, I see areas for improvement, particularly regarding the misconception that any amount of data can simply be dumped into Elastic Search. When creating an index, careful consideration of data massaging is essential. Elastic Search stores mappings for various data types, which must remain below a certain threshold to maintain functionality. Users need to throttle the number of fields for searching to avoid overloading the system and ensure that the design of the document is efficient for the Elastic Search index. Additionally, I suggest utilizing ILM periodically throughout the year to manage data shuffling between clusters, preventing hotspots in the distribution of requests across nodes.
it_user823641 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Search Engineer at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees
The Natural Language Search capability is helpful and intuitive for our users
The initial setup is complex because this is a distributed system, and you have to make sure that every individual node is aware of every other node in existence. This search engine has a large capacity, so you need to make sure that there is enough buffer space. We took one month to deploy and perform a fresh setup. Our strategy was to start with a local data center, before venturing into cross data center replicas. A staff size of two to four people is suitable for deploying and maintaining the solution, depending upon the scale. They would set up the solution and put monitoring in place for the indexing jobs, as well as design the schema so that the data can feed well.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's a good log management platform. In terms of infrastructure management, it's good."
"In case there is a failure, Elastic manages everything well, and there no major downtime."
"The most valuable features of Amazon Elasticsearch are ease of use, native JSON, and efficiency. Additionally, handles many use cases and search grammar was useful."
"The initial set up is very easy...We really appreciate Amazon!"
"The stability of the product is good."
"They have the good documentation in the help text and that is the reason the Amazon is the perfect solution in the current market."
"It's actually easier to collaborate since it is already deployed in the AWS cloud itself."
"The customer service is excellent, rated nine out of ten."
"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 security portion of Elasticsearch is particularly beneficial, allowing me to view and analyze security alerts."
"The solution offers good stability."
"It's a stable solution and we have not had any issues."
"It gives us the possibility to store and query this data and also do this efficiently and securely and without delays."
"It is easy to scale with the cluster node model.​"
"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 is very good with no issues or glitches."
"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."
"It has improved our search ranking, relevancy, search performance, and user retention."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to perform a natural language search."
"​Sharding data, Faceting, Hit Highlighting, parent-child Block Join and Grouping, and multi-mode platform are all valuable features."
 

Cons

"As a user, lower prices or reasonable pricing is always better."
"The price is fair yet leans towards the expensive side. I'd rate it five out of ten with respect to capabilities vs. cost."
"Amazon Elasticsearch can improve the bullion in the near search and the ease of integration with Kibana. Additionally, there could be more flexibility in the configuration and documentation."
"In terms of data handling capabilities with Amazon OpenSearch Service, they can be complex and managing data in comparison to other SIM solutions is a major drawback, as it is very hard to handle the data."
"I want to see a new feature in Amazon Elasticsearch Service that allows users to create default filters for filtered levels."
"The pricing aspect is a concern. The service is way too costly. For the past month, I used only 30 to 40 MB of data, and the cost was $500. AWS could improve pricing."
"One glaring issue was with our mapping configuration as the system accepted the data we posted, but after a few months, when we attempted complex queries, we realized the date formatting had become problematic."
"They can enhance data visualization."
"More AI would be beneficial. I would also appreciate more simplicity in dashboards."
"The solution's integration and configuration are not easy. Not many people know exactly what to do."
"In Elastic Search, the improvements I would like to see require many resources."
"There are some features lacking in ELK Elasticsearch."
"I found an issue with Elasticsearch in terms of aggregation. They are good, yet the rules written for this are not really good."
"We'd like to see more integration in the future, especially around service desks or other ITSM tools."
"Elasticsearch should have simpler commands for window filtering."
"I have not explored Elastic Search at the most. Searching from vector DB is available in Elastic Search, and there is one more concept of graph searching or graph database searching. I have not explored it, but if it is not there, that would be an improvement area where Elastic Search can improve."
"SolrCloud stability, indexing and commit speed, and real-time Indexing need improvement."
"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."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a community edition available and the price of the commercial offering is reasonable."
"The solution is not expensive, but priced averagely, I will say."
"You only pay for what you use."
"Compared to other cloud platforms, it is manageable and not very expensive."
"The premium license is expensive."
"To access all the features available you require both the open source license and the production license."
"The tool is not expensive. Its licensing costs are yearly."
"We are using the free version and intend to upgrade."
"The solution is free."
"The version of Elastic Enterprise Search I am using is open source which is free. The pricing model should improve for the enterprise version because it is very expensive."
"The tool is an open-source product."
"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."
"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
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Retailer
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise43
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon OpenSearch Service?
We retrieve historical data with just a click of a button to move it from cold to hot or warm because it's already s...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon OpenSearch Service?
I would consider the pricing as a six based on how much data we are handling; if we handle minimal data, it's cheap, ...
What needs improvement with Amazon OpenSearch Service?
Amazon OpenSearch Service is not providing the processing feature directly. From Amazon OpenSearch Service, we are ac...
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 ve...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ELK Elasticsearch?
On the subject of pricing, Elastic Search is very cost-efficient. You can host it on-premises, which would incur zero...
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
While Elastic Search is a good product, I see areas for improvement, particularly regarding the misconception that an...
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Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon Elasticsearch Service
Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

VIDCOIN, Wyng, Yellow New Zealand, zipMoney, Cimri, Siemens, Unbabel
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.
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, Algolia, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in Search as a Service. Updated: January 2026.
881,757 professionals have used our research since 2012.