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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 product is extremely configurable, allowing you to customize the search experience to suit your needs."
"The customer engagement was good."
"Offers a tremendous amount of flexibility and scalability when integrating with applications."
"Azure Search is well-documented, making it easy to understand and implement."
"The amount of flexibility and agility is really assuring."
"The search functionality time has been reduced to a few milliseconds."
"The solution's initial setup is straightforward."
"Creates indexers to get data from different data sources."
"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."
"It is stable."
"Elastic Search makes handling large data volumes efficient and supports complex search operations."
"It is easy to scale with the cluster node model.​"
"A nonstructured database that can manage large amounts of nonstructured data."
"It gives us the possibility to store and query this data and also do this efficiently and securely and without delays."
"I value the feature that allows me to share the dashboards to different people with different levels of access."
"I have found the sort capability of Elastic very useful for allowing us to find the information we need very quickly."
 

Cons

"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."
"It would be good if the site found a better way to filter things based on subscription."
"The after-hour services are slow."
"The solution's stability could be better."
"Adding items to Azure Search using its .NET APIs sometimes throws exceptions."
"They should add an API for third-party vendors, like a security operating center or reporting system, that would be a big improvement."
"For availability, expanding its use to all Azure datacenters would be helpful in increasing awareness and usage of the product.​"
"I would rate the stability a seven out of ten. We faced a few issues."
"Dashboards could be more flexible, and it would be nice to provide more drill-down capabilities."
"An improvement would be to have an interface that allows easier navigation and tracing of logs."
"The GUI is the part of the program which has the most room for improvement."
"Elastic Enterprise Search could improve the report templates."
"The metadata gets stored along with indexes and isn't queryable."
"This product could be improved with additional security, and the addition of support for machine learning devices."
"Both the graph feature and the reporting feature are a little bit lacking. The alerting also needs to be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"​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."
"The cost is comparable."
"For the actual costs, I encourage users to view the pricing page on the Azure site for details.​"
"The solution is affordable."
"I think the solution's pricing is ok compared to other cloud devices."
"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, where one is the low price, and ten is the high price."
"The basic license is free, but it comes with a lot of features that aren't free. With a gold license, we get active directory integration. With a platinum license, we get alerting."
"The solution is free."
"We are using the free version and intend to upgrade."
"The solution is affordable."
"The pricing structure depends on the scalability steps."
"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 price of Elastic Enterprise is very, very competitive."
"We are paying $1,500 a month to use the solution. If you want to have endpoint protection you need to pay more."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Retailer
8%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

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: July 2025.
864,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.