Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Amazon Kendra 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 Kendra
Ranking in Search as a Service
4th
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
6.7
Number of Reviews
72
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (10th), Vector Databases (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon Kendra is 11.3%, down from 21.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 18.6%, up from 9.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Search18.6%
Amazon Kendra11.3%
Other70.1%
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

AM
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.
Anand_Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Captures data from all other sources and becomes a MOM aka monitoring of monitors
Scalability and ROI are the areas they have to improve. Their license terms are based on the number of cores. If you increase the number of cores, it becomes very difficult to manage at a large scale. For example, if I have a $3 million project, I won't sell it because if we're dealing with a 10 TB or 50 TB system, there are a lot of systems and applications to monitor, and I have to make an MOM (Mean of Max) for everything. This is because of the cost impact. Also, when you have horizontal scaling, it's like a multi-story building with only one elevator. You have to run around, and it's not efficient. Even the smallest task becomes difficult. That's the problem with horizontal scaling. They need to improve this because if they increase the cores and adjust the licensing accordingly, it would make more sense.

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."
"Provides flexibility to tune the relevance and ranking of results."
"The AI-based attribute tagging is a valuable feature."
"The forced merge and forced resonate features reduce the data size increasing reliability."
"The most valuable features are the ease and speed of the setup."
"The stability of Elasticsearch was very high, and I would rate it a ten."
"The solution has good security features. I have been happy with the dashboards and interface."
"We can easily collect all the data and view historical trends using the product. We can view the applications and identify the issues effectively."
"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."
"Helps us to store the data in key value pairs and, based on that, we can produce visualisations in Kibana."
 

Cons

"The time it takes for indexing documents could be reduced."
"There are some token limits."
"Technical support should be faster."
"The GUI is the part of the program which has the most room for improvement."
"Could have more open source tools and testing."
"Elasticsearch should have simpler commands for window filtering."
"The reports could improve."
"Elastic Search needs to improve its technical support. It should be customer-friendly and have good support."
"I found an issue with Elasticsearch in terms of aggregation. They are good, yet the rules written for this are not really good."
"They're making changes in their architecture too frequently."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing falls in the medium range."
"To access all the features available you require both the open source license and the production license."
"We are paying $1,500 a month to use the solution. If you want to have endpoint protection you need to pay more."
"we are using a licensed version of the product."
"The tool is an open-source product."
"Although the ELK Elasticsearch software is open-source, we buy the hardware."
"We use the free version for some logs, but not extensive use."
"The solution is free."
"ELK has been considered as an alternative to Splunk to reduce licensing costs."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Search as a Service solutions are best for your needs.
866,286 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
8%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise33
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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?
We used the open-source version of Elasticsearch, which was free.
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
Elastic Search could improve in areas such as search criteria and query processes, as search times were longer prior to implementing Elastic Search. Elastic Search has limitations for handling huge...
 

Comparisons

 

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: July 2025.
866,286 professionals have used our research since 2012.