No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

AWS AppSync 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

AWS AppSync
Ranking in Cloud Data Integration
25th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Elastic Search
Ranking in Cloud Data Integration
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
100
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Search as a Service (1st), Vector Databases (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Cloud Data Integration category, the mindshare of AWS AppSync is 1.1%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 1.7%, down from 1.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Integration Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Elastic Search1.7%
AWS AppSync1.1%
Other97.2%
Cloud Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

Akil Saji - PeerSpot reviewer
AWS Cloud Developer at Mobil80 Solutions and Services Pvt. Ltd.
Ease of creating APIs with ongoing updates needed for automation
AWS has made it easy for developers like me to create and manage GraphQL APIs. The ease of use is a main advantage, allowing even beginners to start from scratch and learn through AppSync. Before AWS, developing and managing APIs was quite complex. AWS provided AppSync, which assists developers and startup founders. Startups blooming everywhere benefit from this service, welcoming those who lack prior knowledge. When working on AWS, I notice that Amazon regularly implements new features. For instance, with the Lambda service, AWS is transitioning from an old editor to a new one. Similarly, AppSync frequently introduces updates and changes. This trend is making the user interface more accessible, even for individuals without a technical background. Additionally, the cost is attractive, as AWS operates on a pay-as-you-go basis. These factors make AppSync both easy to use and cost-effective.
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

"AWS has made it easy for developers like me to create and manage GraphQL APIs."
"Support for multiple data sources and formats is a fantastic feature."
"There's lots of processing power. You can actually just add machines to get more performance if you need to. It's pretty flexible and very easy to add another log. It's not like 'oh, no, it's going to be so much extra data'. That's not a problem for the machine. It can handle it."
"The best feature of Elastic Search that I appreciate is its monitoring capability."
"Dashboard is very customizable."
"The most valuable features are its user-friendly interface and seamless navigation."
"The most valuable feature of Elastic Enterprise Search is the Discovery option for the visualization of logs on a GPU instead of on the server."
"Data indexing of historical data is the most beneficial feature of the product."
"All the quality features are there. There are about 60 to 70 reports available."
"The fact that you can dump any type of format in the database without any specific reformatting is fantastic."
 

Cons

"In AppSync, assigning roles and permissions to APIs is necessary for accessing other AWS services. Automating this task when creating APIs would be beneficial."
"Moving to other clouds is impossible without significantly rearchitecting your applications."
"The open source version should ship basic security versions with it."
"Both the graph feature and the reporting feature are a little bit lacking. The alerting also needs to be improved."
"Its licensing needs to be improved. They don't offer a perpetual license. They want to know how many nodes you will be using, and they ask for an annual subscription. Otherwise, they don't give you permission to use it. Our customers are generally military or police departments or customers without connection to the internet. Therefore, this model is not suitable for us. This subscription-based model is not the best for OEM vendors. Another annoying thing about Elasticsearch is its roadmap. We are developing something, and then they say, "Okay. We have removed that feature in this release," and when we are adapting to that release, they say, "Okay. We have removed that one as well." We don't know what they will remove in the next version. They are not looking for backward compatibility from the customers' perspective. They just remove a feature and say, "Okay. We've removed this one." In terms of new features, it should have an ODBC driver so that you can search and integrate this product with existing BI tools and reporting tools. Currently, you need to go for third parties, such as CData, in order to achieve this. ODBC driver is the most important feature required. Its Community Edition does not have security features. For example, you cannot authenticate with a username and password. It should have security features. They might have put it in the latest release."
"This product could be improved with additional security, and the addition of support for machine learning devices."
"Improving machine learning capabilities would be beneficial."
"Scalability and ROI are the areas they have to improve."
"The metadata gets stored along with indexes and isn't queryable."
"I have not been using the solution for many years to know exactly the improvements needed. However, they could simplify how the YML files have to be structured properly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis, and it is a pay-as-you-go model."
"Elastic Search is open-source, but you need to pay for support, which is expensive."
"The pricing structure depends on the scalability steps."
"Although the ELK Elasticsearch software is open-source, we buy the hardware."
"The pricing model is questionable and needs to be addressed because when you would like to have the security they charge per machine."
"It can be expensive."
"The solution is not expensive because users have the option of choosing the managed or the subscription model."
"The price of Elasticsearch is fair. It is a more expensive solution, like QRadar. The price for Elasticsearch is not much more than other solutions we have."
"​The pricing and license model are clear: node-based model."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Data Integration solutions are best for your needs.
909,948 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
21%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Healthcare Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
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

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS AppSync?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was good and easy. About the pricing and setup cost, there is no major setup cost required for AWS AppSync, which is a really great thing becau...
What needs improvement with AWS AppSync?
The current features of AWS AppSync are enough for any developer, but it has some areas for improvement. AWS AppSync can provide first-class support for SQL RDS since writing SQL via VTL is clunky ...
What is your primary use case for AWS AppSync?
My main use case for AWS AppSync is to deploy the application by connecting my frontend and backend application. AWS AppSync serves as a GraphQL API Gateway that sits between my frontend and backen...
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

AppSync
Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ACBL, Puresec, IDT, ASU, Public Good, cookpad, ALDO, ticketmaster
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 AWS AppSync vs. Elastic Search and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,948 professionals have used our research since 2012.