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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
6.7
Number of Reviews
67
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (9th), Vector Databases (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Azure Search is 14.6%, up from 13.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 14.4%, up from 8.3% 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

"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."
"The customer engagement was good."
"It provides good access capabilities to various platforms."
"The amount of flexibility and agility is really assuring."
"Azure Search is well-documented, making it easy to understand and implement."
"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."
"The solution is very good with no issues or glitches."
"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 observability is the best available because it provides granular insights that identify reasons for defects."
"Search is really powerful."
"The most valuable features are the detection and correlation features."
"I value the feature that allows me to share the dashboards to different people with different levels of access."
"The products comes with REST APIs."
"It is highly valuable because of its simplicity in maintenance, where most tasks are handled for you, and it offers a plethora of built-in features."
 

Cons

"The solution's stability could be better."
"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."
"For availability, expanding its use to all Azure datacenters would be helpful in increasing awareness and usage of the product.​"
"The initial setup is not as easy as it should be."
"They should add an API for third-party vendors, like a security operating center or reporting system, that would be a big improvement."
"It would be good if the site found a better way to filter things based on subscription."
"The after-hour services are slow."
"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."
"Improving machine learning capabilities would be beneficial."
"An improvement would be to have an interface that allows easier navigation and tracing of logs."
"Kibana should be more friendly, especially when building dashboards."
"We have an issue with the volume of data that we can handle."
"There is another solution I'm testing which has a 500 record limit when you do a search on Elastic Enterprise Search. That's the only area in which I'm not sure whether it's a limitation on our end in terms of knowledge or a technical limitation from Elastic Enterprise Search. There is another solution we are looking at that rides on Elastic Enterprise Search. And the limit is for any sort of records that you're doing or data analysis you're trying to do, you can only extract 500 records at a time. I know the open-source nature has a lot of limitations, Otherwise, Elastic Enterprise Search is a fantastic solution and I'd recommend it to anyone."
"Elastic Search needs to improve authentication. It also needs to work on the Kibana visualization dashboard."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"I think the solution's pricing is ok compared to other cloud devices."
"The solution is affordable."
"The cost is comparable."
"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."
"Although the ELK Elasticsearch software is open-source, we buy the hardware."
"ELK has been considered as an alternative to Splunk to reduce licensing costs."
"The tool is not expensive. Its licensing costs are yearly."
"It can be expensive."
"To access all the features available you require both the open source license and the production license."
"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
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
15%
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?
I don't know about pricing. That is dealt with by the sales team and our account team. I was not involved with that.
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
I found an issue with Elasticsearch in terms of aggregation. They are good, yet the rules written for this are not really good. There is a maximum of 10,000 entries, so the limitation means that if...
 

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: April 2025.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.