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 June 2025, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Azure Search is 13.8%, up from 13.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 16.3%, up from 8.5% 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 solution's initial setup is straightforward."
"Offers a tremendous amount of flexibility and scalability when integrating with applications."
"The product is pretty resilient."
"It provides good access capabilities to various platforms."
"Azure Search is well-documented, making it easy to understand and implement."
"The customer engagement was good."
"The amount of flexibility and agility is really assuring."
"The product is extremely configurable, allowing you to customize the search experience to suit your needs."
"The full text search capabilities in Elastic Search have proven to be extremely valuable for our operations."
"I appreciate that Elastic Enterprise Search is easy to use and that we have people on our team who are able to manage it effectively."
"The solution is quite scalable and this is one of its advantages."
"Using real-time search functionality to support operational decisions has been helpful."
"Overall, considering key aspects like cost, learning curve, and data indexing architecture, Elasticsearch is a very good tool."
"The product is scalable with good performance."
"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."
"I value the feature that allows me to share the dashboards to different people with different levels of access."
 

Cons

"Adding items to Azure Search using its .NET APIs sometimes throws exceptions."
"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."
"The after-hour services are slow."
"For availability, expanding its use to all Azure datacenters would be helpful in increasing awareness and usage of the product.​"
"It would be good if the site found a better way to filter things based on subscription."
"The pricing is room for improvement."
"They should add an API for third-party vendors, like a security operating center or reporting system, that would be a big improvement."
"The real-time search functionality is not operational due to its impact on system resources."
"Elastic Enterprise Search could improve the report templates."
"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."
"It was not possible to use authentication three years back. You needed to buy the product's services for authentication."
"The pricing of this product needs to be more clear because I cannot understand it when I review the website."
"The one area that can use improvement is the automapping of fields."
"Both the graph feature and the reporting feature are a little bit lacking. The alerting also needs to be improved."
"Scalability and ROI are the areas they have to improve."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is affordable."
"For the actual costs, I encourage users to view the pricing page on the Azure site for details.​"
"The cost is comparable."
"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."
"​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."
"Elastic Search is open-source, but you need to pay for support, which is expensive."
"The solution is free."
"The pricing structure depends on the scalability steps."
"It can be expensive."
"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 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."
"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."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Search as a Service solutions are best for your needs.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
24%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Retailer
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
16%
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?
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.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.