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Amazon Kendra vs Elastic Search comparison

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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 Kendra
Ranking in Search as a Service
8th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
2
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
100
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (6th), Vector Databases (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon Kendra is 6.5%, down from 9.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 15.3%, down from 19.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Elastic Search15.3%
Amazon Kendra6.5%
Other78.2%
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

AM
Architect at IGT Solutions
Kendra has a nice AI built-in, enhancing the search experience and highly stable solution
There are many valuable features. For example, there are many documents that contain a lot of legal information. So we want to understand whether all the documents have the required complaint-related information or not, and whether they are following the standard policies of documentation. We have multiple documents, so we don't know which document has the sought-after information. Therefore, we want to perform an enterprise search on it. So there are a lot of use cases we are trying to build using these newer technologies, specifically Kendra. Moreover, Kendra has AI, which has an upper edge, and that is really helpful. It has a nice AI inbuilt, which improves the search part of it.
reviewer2817942 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Logging and vector search have transformed observability and empowered reliable ai agents
Elastic Search is not specifically being used for certain purposes. I deploy Elastic Search database on the cloud and use cloud services so that nobody can attack. However, I do not use Elastic Search to resolve attack issues. The basic main purpose of Elastic Search, as of now, I feel it can do more in the AI area. Sometime I saw that when I am developing RAG and have to generate the embeddings, which I call metadata, sometimes it tries to fail. That durability or issue handling should be improved, but apart from that, I did not find anything as of now. As per my use case, whatever I am using seems pretty good. Apart from that, some definitely improvement will be there. One improvement is that it should be faster. Whenever I am searching any logs, it takes much time. For example, if I open my log in Notepad or a similar tool, I can search the text within a second. With Elastic Search, it takes a little bit of time, ten to fifteen seconds. That can be improved. Sometimes, engineers take time to assign when I create a ticket.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We have good use cases where stability is everything. So it's a stable solution."
"Until recently, there wasn't an out-of-the-box service in the market for enterprise documents like Kendra."
"Provides flexibility to tune the relevance and ranking of results."
"I find the solution to be fast."
"It gives us the possibility to store and query this data and also do this efficiently and securely and without delays."
"The initial installation and setup were straightforward."
"The most valuable feature is the out of the box Kibana."
"The product is scalable with good performance."
"I appreciate the indexing capabilities and the speed of indexing in their product, which demonstrates how quickly logs are collected and stored."
"The products comes with REST APIs."
"Elastic Search positively impacts my company with many benefits across multiple use cases; for example, it enables quick dashboard setups for client reviews and presents data efficiently, ensuring good user experience."
 

Cons

"The time it takes for indexing documents could be reduced."
"This is a really, really expensive solution making the adoption of it very difficult at the enterprise level."
"There are some token limits."
"Elastic Enterprise Search's tech support is good but it could be improved."
"Elasticsearch should have simpler commands for window filtering."
"The deployment was a struggle as I faced challenges with bash commands and understanding how to run things on my system."
"The solution itself needs improvement. There is an index issue in which the data starts to crash as it increases."
"I would rate the stability a seven out of ten. We faced a few issues."
"I think the biggest issue we had with Elastic Search was regarding integrations with our multi-factor authentication tool."
"The upgrade experience and inflexibility with fields keeps Elastic Search from being a perfect 10."
"According to me, as far as I have seen, people will start moving from Elastic Search sooner or later. Why? Because it is expensive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing falls in the medium range."
"The premium license is expensive."
"The solution is affordable."
"The pricing structure depends on the scalability steps."
"We are using the Community Edition because Elasticsearch's licensing model is not flexible or suitable for us. They ask for an annual subscription. We also got the development consultancy from Elasticsearch for 60 days or something like that, but they were just trying to do the same trick. That's why we didn't purchase it. We are just using the Community Edition."
"The basic license is free, but it comes with a lot of features that aren't free. With a gold license, we get active directory integration. With a platinum license, we get alerting."
"The price of Elastic Enterprise is very, very competitive."
"The price could be better."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business40
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise50
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ELK Elasticsearch?
The pricing for Elastic Search is mainly budgeted according to the organization budget, so we take it as a yearly subscription, and that is acceptable since we do get a fair discount when we are ta...
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
When we get the logs, it is mostly about how we edit the configurations and how we make changes according to the requirements of our organization. In these cases, the logs sometimes can be a bit in...
What is your primary use case for ELK Elasticsearch?
I am the Elastic Search admin for my organization, and we are using Elastic Search to handle the traffic to GCP. The monitoring of all the clusters and all the deployments are quite good, and compa...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
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 Kendra vs. Elastic Search and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
915,287 professionals have used our research since 2012.