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Elastic Search vs OpenText Knowledge Discovery (IDOL) 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

Elastic Search
Ranking in Indexing and Search
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
69
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Integration (11th), Search as a Service (1st), Vector Databases (2nd)
OpenText Knowledge Discover...
Ranking in Indexing and Search
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Indexing and Search category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 24.5%, down from 26.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenText Knowledge Discovery (IDOL) is 7.5%, down from 9.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Indexing and Search
 

Featured Reviews

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.
ERICK RAMIREZ - PeerSpot reviewer
Scales linearly and vertically; primarily used in AI
If I am not wrong, IDOL is working to release improvements in new capabilities in the next six months. There is room for improvement in some very important capabilities in visual analytics. They have been focusing on improving the face recognition algorithm. The accuracy of object detection could be improved as well and I know they are working on that at the moment. I would like to see some machine learning capabilities added to the next release.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Gives us a more user-friendly, centralized solution (for those who just needed a quick glance, without being masters of sed and awk) as well as the ability to implement various mechanisms for machine-learning from our logs, and sending alerts for anomalies."
"The search speed is most valuable and important."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its utility and usefulness."
"Dashboard is very customizable."
"It's a stable solution and we have not had any issues."
"The most valuable feature of Elastic Enterprise Search is user behavior analysis."
"The stability of Elasticsearch was very high, and I would rate it a ten."
"The most valuable feature for us is the analytics that we can configure and view using Kibana."
"IDOL has several important visual analytics, like face recognition and object detection and recognition."
 

Cons

"Both the graph feature and the reporting feature are a little bit lacking. The alerting also needs to be improved."
"The GUI is the part of the program which has the most room for improvement."
"The solution has quite a steep learning curve. The usability and general user-friendliness could be improved. However, that is kind of typical with products that have a lot of flexibility, or a lot of capabilities. Sometimes having more choices makes things more complex. It makes it difficult to configure it, though. It's kind of a bitter pill that you have to swallow in the beginning and you really have to get through it."
"Ratio aggregation is not supported in this solution."
"Kibana should be more friendly, especially when building dashboards."
"There is an index issue in which the data starts to crash as it increases."
"The reports could improve."
"There are potential improvements based on our client feedback, like unifying the licensing cost structure."
"There is room for improvement in some very important capabilities in visual analytics. They have been focusing on improving the face recognition algorithm. The accuracy of object detection could be improved as well and I know they are working on that at the moment."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Elastic Search is open-source, but you need to pay for support, which is expensive."
"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."
"The solution is less expensive than Stackdriver and Grafana."
"The cost varies based on factors like usage volume, network load, data storage size, and service utilization. If your usage isn't too extensive, the cost will be lower."
"We are paying $1,500 a month to use the solution. If you want to have endpoint protection you need to pay more."
"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 pricing and license model are clear: node-based model."
"This is a free, open source software (FOSS) tool, which means no cost on the front-end. There are no free lunches in this world though. Technical skill to implement and support are costly on the back-end with ELK, whether you train/hire internally or go for premium services from Elastic."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
19%
Transportation Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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...
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Comparisons

No data available
 

Also Known As

Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
Micro Focus IDOL, HPE Autonomy IDOL, HPE IDOL
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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.
RTVE, Krungthai Bank, Kainos, Capax Discovery
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Search vs. OpenText Knowledge Discovery (IDOL) and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,760 professionals have used our research since 2012.