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Azure AI 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 September 2025, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Azure AI Search is 10.4%, down from 13.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 19.3%, up from 10.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Solr is 5.4%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Search19.3%
Azure AI Search10.4%
Solr5.4%
Other64.9%
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

Sandeep Srirangam - PeerSpot reviewer
Customer engagement & documentation about APIs are great, but it would be good if the UI is a bit more intuitive for search experience
I use the solution mainly to search the logs and to search for VMs by their names or subscription names. I wouldn't rate it great since the logs are a bit complicated The solution was really pretty good. The customer engagement was good. The presented documentation or exposure to the APIs to get…
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.
reviewer823641 - PeerSpot reviewer
The Natural Language Search capability is helpful and intuitive for our users
The initial setup is complex because this is a distributed system, and you have to make sure that every individual node is aware of every other node in existence. This search engine has a large capacity, so you need to make sure that there is enough buffer space. We took one month to deploy and perform a fresh setup. Our strategy was to start with a local data center, before venturing into cross data center replicas. A staff size of two to four people is suitable for deploying and maintaining the solution, depending upon the scale. They would set up the solution and put monitoring in place for the indexing jobs, as well as design the schema so that the data can feed well.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"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."
"Azure Search is well-documented, making it easy to understand and implement."
"It provides good access capabilities to various platforms."
"Because all communication is done via the REST API, data is retrieved quickly in JSON format to reduce overhead and latency.​"
"The customer engagement was good."
"The product is extremely configurable, allowing you to customize the search experience to suit your needs."
"The most valuable features are the ease and speed of the setup."
"The products comes with REST APIs."
"I have found the sort capability of Elastic very useful for allowing us to find the information we need very quickly."
"The initial setup is very easy for small environments."
"Dashboard is very customizable."
"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."
"Elastic Search is very quick when handling a large volume of data."
"The most valuable features are the data store and the X-pack extension."
"​Sharding data, Faceting, Hit Highlighting, parent-child Block Join and Grouping, and multi-mode platform are all valuable features."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to perform a natural language search."
"It has improved our search ranking, relevancy, search performance, and user retention."
"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."
 

Cons

"The solution's stability could be better."
"Adding items to Azure Search using its .NET APIs sometimes throws exceptions."
"The initial setup is not as easy as it should be."
"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."
"It would be good if the site found a better way to filter things based on subscription."
"The after-hour services are slow."
"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."
"Elastic Enterprise Search could improve its SSL integration easier. We should not need to go to the back-end servers to do configuration, we should be able to do it on the GUI."
"I would like to see more integration for the solution with different platforms."
"Elastic Search should provide better guides for developers."
"The one area that can use improvement is the automapping of fields."
"I don't see improvements at the moment. The current setup is working well for me, and I'm satisfied with it. Integrating with different platforms is also fine, and I'm not recommending any changes or enhancements right now."
"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."
"Elastic Search needs to improve authentication. It also needs to work on the Kibana visualization dashboard."
"I would rate the stability a seven out of ten. We faced a few issues."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"SolrCloud stability, indexing and commit speed, and real-time Indexing need improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"For the actual costs, I encourage users to view the pricing page on the Azure site for details.​"
"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 solution is affordable."
"​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."
"This product is open-source and can be used free of charge."
"​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 premium license is expensive."
"The solution is affordable."
"We use the free version for some logs, but not extensive use."
"It can be expensive."
"The tool is not expensive. Its licensing costs are yearly."
"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
23%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Retailer
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Retailer
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise33
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Azure Search?
The after-hour services are slow. It could be better.
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?
We used the open-source version of Elasticsearch, which was free.
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
Elastic Search could improve in areas such as search criteria and query processes, as search times were longer prior ...
Ask a question
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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, Algolia, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in Search as a Service. Updated: August 2025.
866,956 professionals have used our research since 2012.