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Azure Search vs Elastic Search vs Solr 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:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Azure Search is 14.3%, up from 13.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 15.6%, up from 8.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Solr is 6.2%, down from 6.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
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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.
reviewer1368636 - PeerSpot reviewer
Good indexing and decent stability, but requires more documentation
The solution's grammar and syntax should be easier. It does take a little bit of effort to use and understand the solution. It would help us a lot if the solution offered up more documentation or tutorials to help with training or troubleshooting. MongoDB can realize more complex operations than Solr can. Solr should add some more complex operations to the database to at least bring it up to MondoDB's level of functionality. It would make it more competitive. There might be some compatibility issues between the data types within Solr. This needs to be improved. Solr has a schema that we have to load the schema as an HTML, or SML file. This usually needs to be done by our engineers. It should be easier to do without needing too much technical background.

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 extremely configurable, allowing you to customize the search experience to suit your needs."
"Offers a tremendous amount of flexibility and scalability when integrating with applications."
"Creates indexers to get data from different data sources."
"The search functionality time has been reduced to a few milliseconds."
"The product is pretty resilient."
"It provides good access capabilities to various platforms."
"The customer engagement was good."
"The solution offers good stability."
"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."
"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 analytics with Elastic benefits us due to the huge traffic volume in our organization, which reaches up to 60,000 requests per second. With logs of approximately 25 GB per day, manually analyzing traffic behavior, payloads, headers, user agents, and other details is impractical."
"I find the solution to be fast."
"The solution is quite scalable and this is one of its advantages."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its utility and usefulness."
"The forced merge and forced resonate features reduce the data size increasing reliability."
"You have dashboards, it is visual, there are maps, you can create canvases. It's more visual than anything that I've ever used."
"One of the best aspects of the solution is the indexing. It's already indexed to all the fields in the category. We don't need to spend so much extra effort to do the indexing. It's great."
"It has improved our search ranking, relevancy, search performance, and user retention."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to perform a natural language search."
"​Sharding data, Faceting, Hit Highlighting, parent-child Block Join and Grouping, and multi-mode platform are all valuable features."
 

Cons

"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."
"They should add an API for third-party vendors, like a security operating center or reporting system, that would be a big improvement."
"The after-hour services are slow."
"Adding items to Azure Search using its .NET APIs sometimes throws exceptions."
"The pricing is room for improvement."
"The solution's stability could be better."
"The initial setup is not as easy as it should be."
"There are challenges with performance management and scalability."
"The solution must provide AI integrations."
"There is a lack of technical people to develop, implement and optimize equipment operation and web queries."
"Improving machine learning capabilities would be beneficial."
"Its licensing needs to be improved. They don't offer a perpetual license. They want to know how many nodes you will be using, and they ask for an annual subscription. Otherwise, they don't give you permission to use it. Our customers are generally military or police departments or customers without connection to the internet. Therefore, this model is not suitable for us. This subscription-based model is not the best for OEM vendors. Another annoying thing about Elasticsearch is its roadmap. We are developing something, and then they say, "Okay. We have removed that feature in this release," and when we are adapting to that release, they say, "Okay. We have removed that one as well." We don't know what they will remove in the next version. They are not looking for backward compatibility from the customers' perspective. They just remove a feature and say, "Okay. We've removed this one." In terms of new features, it should have an ODBC driver so that you can search and integrate this product with existing BI tools and reporting tools. Currently, you need to go for third parties, such as CData, in order to achieve this. ODBC driver is the most important feature required. Its Community Edition does not have security features. For example, you cannot authenticate with a username and password. It should have security features. They might have put it in the latest release."
"We have an issue with the volume of data that we can handle."
"The one area that can use improvement is the automapping of fields."
"Elastic Enterprise Search's tech support is good but it could be improved."
"SolrCloud stability, indexing and commit speed, and real-time Indexing need improvement."
"The performance for this solution, in terms of queries, could be improved."
"With increased sharding, performance degrades. Merger, when present, is a bottle-neck. Peer-to-peer sync has issues in SolrCloud when index is incrementally updated."
"It does take a little bit of effort to use and understand the solution. It would help us a lot if the solution offered up more documentation or tutorials to help with training or troubleshooting."
"Encountered issues with both master-slave and SolrCloud. Indexing and serving traffic from same collection has very poor performance. Some components are slow for searching."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost is comparable."
"For the actual costs, I encourage users to view the pricing page on the Azure site for details.​"
"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."
"​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 solution is affordable."
"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."
"It can be expensive."
"The pricing structure depends on the scalability steps."
"The price of Elastic Enterprise is very, very competitive."
"The price could be better."
"The tool is not expensive. Its licensing costs are yearly."
"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."
"We are using the open-sourced version."
"The only costs in addition to the standard licensing fees are related to the hardware, depending on whether it is cloud-based, or on-premise."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
24%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
6%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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 ve...
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 re...
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Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
No data available
 

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.
eHarmony, Sears, StubHub, Best Buy, Instagram, Netflix, Disney, AT&T, eBay, AOL, Bloomberg, Comcast, Ticketmaster, Travelocity, MTV Networks
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Algolia and others in Search as a Service. Updated: April 2025.
850,076 professionals have used our research since 2012.