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

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

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Azure Search is 13.0%, down from 13.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 17.8%, up from 8.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

Mohamed Heikal - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides efficient documentation features, but its support services need improvement
We use the solution to link the Active Directory account to Office 365 The solution's most valuable features are Word, Excel, and documentation. The solution's stability and support could be better. We have been using the solution for three to four years. I rate the solution's stability a six…
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."
"Creates indexers to get data from different data sources."
"The product is extremely configurable, allowing you to customize the search experience to suit your needs."
"Because all communication is done via the REST API, data is retrieved quickly in JSON format to reduce overhead and latency.​"
"The product is pretty resilient."
"It provides good access capabilities to various platforms."
"The customer engagement was good."
"The search functionality time has been reduced to a few milliseconds."
"The ability to aggregate log and machine data into a searchable index reduces time to identify and isolate issues for an application. Saves time in triage and incident response by eliminating manual steps to access and parse logs on separate systems, within large infrastructure footprints."
"The solution offers good stability."
"I really like the visualization that you can do within it. That's really handy. Product-wise, it is a very good and stable product."
"The initial setup is fairly simple."
"The most valuable feature of Elastic Enterprise Search is the opportunity to search behind and between different logs."
"It is a stable and good platform."
"The most valuable feature is the out of the box Kibana."
"The solution is valuable for log analytics."
 

Cons

"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.​"
"The pricing is room for improvement."
"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."
"Adding items to Azure Search using its .NET APIs sometimes throws exceptions."
"The initial setup is not as easy as it should be."
"The after-hour services are slow."
"It would be good if the site found a better way to filter things based on subscription."
"The different applications need to be individually deployed."
"Elastic Enterprise Search's tech support is good but it could be improved."
"Both the graph feature and the reporting feature are a little bit lacking. The alerting also needs to be improved."
"The reports could improve."
"Kibana should be more friendly, especially when building dashboards."
"I found an issue with Elasticsearch in terms of aggregation. They are good, yet the rules written for this are not really good."
"It needs email notification, similar to what Logentries has. Because of the notification issue, we moved to Logentries, as it provides a simple way to receive notification whenever a server encounters an error or unexpected conditions (which we have defined using RegEx​)."
"I would like to see more integration for the solution with different platforms."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I think the solution's pricing is ok compared to other cloud devices."
"The cost is comparable."
"The solution is affordable."
"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."
"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, where one is the low price, and ten is the high price."
"​The pricing and license model are clear: node-based 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 solution is not expensive because users have the option of choosing the managed or the subscription model."
"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."
"The premium license is expensive."
"The pricing model is questionable and needs to be addressed because when you would like to have the security they charge per machine."
"ELK has been considered as an alternative to Splunk to reduce licensing costs."
"Elastic Search is open-source, but you need to pay for support, which is expensive."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Search as a Service solutions are best for your needs.
861,481 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Retailer
8%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Azure Search?
The after-hour services are slow. It could be better.
What is your primary use case for Azure Search?
We use the solution to link the Active Directory account to Office 365.
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

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 Search vs. Elastic Search and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
861,481 professionals have used our research since 2012.