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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
6.8
Number of Reviews
69
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (11th), Vector Databases (2nd)
Solr
Ranking in Search as a Service
8th
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Search as a Service category, 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.
Search as a Service
 

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.
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

"Using real-time search functionality to support operational decisions has been helpful."
"I find the solution to be fast."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its utility and usefulness."
"The most valuable feature of Elastic Enterprise Search is the opportunity to search behind and between different logs."
"The most valuable feature is the out of the box Kibana."
"The most valuable feature of Elastic Enterprise Search is the Discovery option for the visualization of logs on a GPU instead of on the server."
"The products comes with REST APIs."
"The most valuable feature of Elastic Enterprise Search is user behavior analysis."
"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."
"It has improved our search ranking, relevancy, search performance, and user retention."
 

Cons

"Technical support should be faster."
"I found an issue with Elasticsearch in terms of aggregation. They are good, yet the rules written for this are not really good."
"Elasticsearch could be improved in terms of scalability."
"While integrating with tools like agents for ingesting data from sources like firewalls is valuable, I believe prioritizing improvements to the core product would be more beneficial."
"It is hard to learn and understand because it is a very big platform. This is the main reason why we still have nothing in production. We have to learn some things before we get there."
"Kibana should be more friendly, especially when building dashboards."
"Elastic Search should provide better guides for developers."
"They're making changes in their architecture too frequently."
"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."
"SolrCloud stability, indexing and commit speed, and real-time Indexing need improvement."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This product is open-source and can be used free of charge."
"The price of Elastic Enterprise is very, very competitive."
"Elastic Search is open-source, but you need to pay for support, which is expensive."
"The premium license is expensive."
"The solution is affordable."
"The price could be better."
"The pricing model is questionable and needs to be addressed because when you would like to have the security they charge per machine."
"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."
"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
17%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
18%
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 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

 

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: April 2025.
850,760 professionals have used our research since 2012.