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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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Elastic Search
Ranking in Search as a Service
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
82
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (8th), Vector Databases (2nd)
Solr
Ranking in Search as a Service
10th
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2025, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 19.1%, up from 13.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Solr is 4.6%, down from 6.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Search19.1%
Solr4.6%
Other76.3%
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

MichaelSmith9 - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Unified search has powered feature‑driven research with minimal maintenance overhead
We haven't had the opportunity to use the hybrid search with Elastic Search yet. I think there's a place for it in our long-term solution, but we're not quite there yet. We haven't yet used any AI features built into Elastic Search. To do what we want to do with Elastic Search, the queries can get complex and require a fuller understanding of the DSL. Once we start to build that understanding, it's another muscle we have, so it's not a bad thing, but it just takes a while to get up and running with expertise for our engineers. It's not hard to learn how to use more complex things in Elastic Search; it's just a challenge we're going to face.
reviewer823641 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Search Engineer at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees
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

"The solution is stable and reliable."
"Decision-making has become much faster due to real-time data and quick responses."
"X-Pack provides good features, like authorization and alerts."
"The search speed is most valuable and important."
"I really like the visualization that you can do within it. That's really handy. Product-wise, it is a very good and stable product."
"The forced merge and forced resonate features reduce the data size increasing reliability."
"It's a stable solution and we have not had any issues."
"The observability is the best available because it provides granular insights that identify reasons for defects."
"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."
"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

"Elasticsearch could be improved in terms of scalability."
"Elastic Search should provide better guides for developers."
"The one area that can use improvement is the automapping of fields."
"Technical support should be faster."
"It should be easier to use. It has been getting better because many functions are pre-defined, but it still needs improvement."
"The setup is somewhat complicated due to multiple dependencies and relations with different systems."
"I would like to be able to do correlations between multiple indexes."
"We'd like to see more integration in the future, especially around service desks or other ITSM tools."
"SolrCloud stability, indexing and commit speed, and real-time Indexing need improvement."
"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."
"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."
"The performance for this solution, in terms of queries, could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 pricing and license model are clear: node-based model."
"The pricing structure depends on the scalability steps."
"An X-Pack license is more affordable than Splunk."
"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 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."
"It can move from $10,000 US Dollars per year to any price based on how powerful you need the searches to be and the capacity in terms of storage and process."
"The price could be better."
"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
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Retailer
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise41
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?
Elastic Search's pricing totally depends on the server. Managed services from AWS are used, and we have worked on a self-managed Elastic Search cluster. On the AWS side, it is very expensive becaus...
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
Elastic Search has an annoying limitation regarding page size. It has a specific limit for queries on Elastic Search, and the default is ten thousand, and we can increase it. However, after increas...
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Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
No data available
 

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.
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 Search vs. Solr and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,371 professionals have used our research since 2012.