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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
2nd
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
6.8
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (9th), Vector Databases (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon Kendra is 14.7%, down from 22.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 16.3%, up from 8.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
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 stability of Elasticsearch was very high, and I would rate it a ten."
"The most valuable features of Elastic Enterprise Search are it's cloud-ready and we do a lot of infrastructure as code. By using ELK, we're able to deploy the solution as part of our ISC deployment."
"The solution is very good with no issues or glitches."
"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."
"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 analytics with Elastic benefits us due to the huge traffic volume in our organization, which reaches up to 60,000 requests per second. With logs of approximately 25 GB per day, manually analyzing traffic behavior, payloads, headers, user agents, and other details is impractical."
"The AI-based attribute tagging is a valuable feature."
"Using real-time search functionality to support operational decisions has been helpful."
"The most valuable feature for us is the analytics that we can configure and view using Kibana."
 

Cons

"The time it takes for indexing documents could be reduced."
"There are some token limits."
"Ratio aggregation is not supported in this solution."
"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."
"Elastic Enterprise Search can improve by adding some kind of search that can be used out of the box without too much struggle with configuration. With every kind of search engine, there is some kind of special function that you need to do. A simple out-of-the-box search would be useful."
"There is an index issue in which the data starts to crash as it increases."
"The different applications need to be individually deployed."
"Machine learning on search needs improvement."
"The metadata gets stored along with indexes and isn't queryable."
"Elastic Search could benefit from a more user-friendly onboarding process for beginners."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing falls in the medium range."
"It can be expensive."
"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."
"We are using the open-sourced version."
"To access all the features available you require both the open source license and the production license."
"The solution is less expensive than Stackdriver and Grafana."
"The solution is not expensive because users have the option of choosing the managed or the subscription model."
"The price of Elastic Enterprise is very, very competitive."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon Kendra?
We have good use cases where stability is everything. So it's a stable solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Kendra?
The pricing falls in the medium range. The cost depends on the size of your use case because it has a fixed cost, not a variable. The licensing is on a monthly basis. There are no extra costs. Only...
What needs improvement with Amazon Kendra?
There are some token limits. We cannot ask questions with more than 30 tokens. Access cannot be more than 200 tokens. And the token is also, like, one point. Then views are very hard limits, and it...
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?
It would be useful if a feature for renaming indices could be added without affecting the performance of other features. However, overall, the consistency and stability of Elasticsearch are already...
 

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: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.