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Azure AI Search 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

Azure AI Search
Ranking in Search as a Service
5th
Average Rating
7.4
Number of Reviews
8
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 September 2025, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Azure AI Search is 10.4%, down from 13.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 19.3%, up from 10.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Search19.3%
Azure AI Search10.4%
Other70.3%
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

Sandeep Srirangam - PeerSpot reviewer
Customer engagement & documentation about APIs are great, but it would be good if the UI is a bit more intuitive for search experience
I use the solution mainly to search the logs and to search for VMs by their names or subscription names. I wouldn't rate it great since the logs are a bit complicated The solution was really pretty good. The customer engagement was good. The presented documentation or exposure to the APIs to get…
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

"The amount of flexibility and agility is really assuring."
"The product is pretty resilient."
"Because all communication is done via the REST API, data is retrieved quickly in JSON format to reduce overhead and latency.​"
"The solution's initial setup is straightforward."
"It provides good access capabilities to various platforms."
"Offers a tremendous amount of flexibility and scalability when integrating with applications."
"Creates indexers to get data from different data sources."
"The customer engagement was good."
"I value the feature that allows me to share the dashboards to different people with different levels of access."
"Elasticsearch includes a graphical user interface (GUI) called Kibana. The GUI features are extremely beneficial to us."
"It provides deep visibility into your cloud and distributed applications, from microservices to serverless architectures. It quickly identifies and resolves the root causes of issues, like gaining visibility into all the cloud-based and on-prem applications."
"The most valuable feature is the out of the box Kibana."
"The observability is the best available because it provides granular insights that identify reasons for defects."
"It is a stable and good platform."
"The solution is quite scalable and this is one of its advantages."
"The stability of Elasticsearch was very high, and I would rate it a ten."
 

Cons

"The after-hour services are slow."
"The pricing is room for improvement."
"The solution's stability could be better."
"For availability, expanding its use to all Azure datacenters would be helpful in increasing awareness and usage of the product.​"
"Adding items to Azure Search using its .NET APIs sometimes throws exceptions."
"It would be good if the site found a better way to filter things based on subscription."
"For SDKs, Azure Search currently offers solutions for .NET and Python. Additional platforms would be welcomed, especially native iOS and Android solutions for mobile development."
"The initial setup is not as easy as it should be."
"Something that could be improved is better integrations with Cortex and QRadar, for example."
"While integrating with tools like agents for ingesting data from sources like firewalls is valuable, I believe prioritizing improvements to the core product would be more beneficial."
"I would like to be able to do correlations between multiple indexes."
"The one area that can use improvement is the automapping of fields."
"Could have more open source tools and testing."
"Elastic Enterprise Search could improve the report templates."
"This product could be improved with additional security, and the addition of support for machine learning devices."
"There is a maximum of 10,000 entries, so the limitation means that if I wanted to analyze certain IP addresses more than 10,000 times, I wouldn't be able to dump or print that information."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, where one is the low price, and ten is the high price."
"The solution is affordable."
"I think the solution's pricing is ok compared to other cloud devices."
"The cost is comparable."
"For the actual costs, I encourage users to view the pricing page on the Azure site for details.​"
"​When telling people about the product, I always encourage them to set up a new service using the free pricing tier. This allows them to learn about the product and its capabilities in a risk-free environment. Depending on their needs, the free tier may be suitable for their projects, however enterprise applications will most likely required a higher, paid tier."
"We are using the free open-sourced version of this solution."
"There is a free version, and there is also a hosted version for which you have to pay. We're currently using the free version. If things go well, we might go for the paid version."
"We are using the free version and intend to upgrade."
"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."
"It can move from $10,000 US Dollars per year to any price based on how powerful you need the searches to be and the capacity in terms of storage and process."
"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 pricing model is questionable and needs to be addressed because when you would like to have the security they charge per machine."
"We use the free version for some logs, but not extensive use."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Retailer
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise33
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Azure Search?
The after-hour services are slow. It could be better.
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

XOMNI, Real Madrid C.F., Weichert Realtors, JLL, NAV CANADA, Medihoo, autoTrader Corporation, Gjirafa
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 Azure AI Search vs. Elastic Search and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
867,497 professionals have used our research since 2012.