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Elastic Search vs IBM InfoSphere Information Server 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
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
96
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (5th), Search as a Service (1st), Vector Databases (2nd)
IBM InfoSphere Information ...
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (32nd), Metadata Management (7th)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2817942 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Logging and vector search have transformed observability and empowered reliable ai agents
Elastic Search is not specifically being used for certain purposes. I deploy Elastic Search database on the cloud and use cloud services so that nobody can attack. However, I do not use Elastic Search to resolve attack issues. The basic main purpose of Elastic Search, as of now, I feel it can do more in the AI area. Sometime I saw that when I am developing RAG and have to generate the embeddings, which I call metadata, sometimes it tries to fail. That durability or issue handling should be improved, but apart from that, I did not find anything as of now. As per my use case, whatever I am using seems pretty good. Apart from that, some definitely improvement will be there. One improvement is that it should be faster. Whenever I am searching any logs, it takes much time. For example, if I open my log in Notepad or a similar tool, I can search the text within a second. With Elastic Search, it takes a little bit of time, ten to fifteen seconds. That can be improved. Sometimes, engineers take time to assign when I create a ticket.
MI
Senior Data Engineer at Mohammed Mansour Alrumiah
Faced challenges with customer support and documentation but have benefited from reliable data integration over the years
As for utilizing the platform's metadata management feature, I have not worked on that feature yet, but personally, I have done that. To evaluate the effectiveness of IBM InfoSphere Information Server's data integration capabilities, if IBM is providing all the solutions we are using, then it is definitely a helpful thing. Mostly, the other thing is that it is a big area including data governance, data lineage, data management, and metadata, but every customer is not putting that much effort and money on that. They mostly migrate the data, use it, and forget it, but slowly things are changing. I am working in Saudi Arabia, so here also data governance, data management, and those kinds of things are getting attention. Regarding how scalable IBM InfoSphere Information Server is, I need to learn how to tune performance and scalability on the cloud. I am familiar with localized hardware, but on the cloud, I still have to do the work around it. In the beginning, we estimate the load and based on that, we put the hardware, but if there is continuous increase, I believe IBM also faces problems. Scalability needs to be improved because once the demand comes, you should be able to improve it, but for that, documentation on how to add hardware or resources to the software needs to be proper. I do not have much hands-on experience with that.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The speed with which Elastic Search is able to search through all of the documents we place into it is quite remarkable, as we search through 65 billion documents in less than a second in most cases, on a constant consistent basis."
"The forced merge and forced resonate features reduce the data size increasing reliability."
"We are developing a SIEM application that is similar to QRadar, ArcSight, or Splunk, and this application uses Elasticsearch as its search engine because we want to retrieve information fast."
"It is highly valuable because of its simplicity in maintenance, where most tasks are handled for you, and it offers a plethora of built-in features."
"The solution offers good stability."
"The tool's stability and performance are good."
"A nonstructured database that can manage large amounts of nonstructured data."
"The most valuable features of Elastic Enterprise Search are it's cloud-ready and we do a lot of infrastructure as code. By using ELK, we're able to deploy the solution as part of our ISC deployment."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"This solution is extremely flexible and scalable."
"Deploying the solution is straightforward for me."
"This solution has reduced the time it takes for ETL. We took an existing Teradata ETL application from three days to eight minutes."
"IBM InfoSphere Information Server is stable."
"The integration with different technologies is the most valuable feature."
"Reduces the loading and development time for Datawarehouse ETL."
"The initial IBM InfoSphere Information Server is straightforward and you can choose what type of installation you want, such as a customized installation, with clear-cut documentation that, if followed, works fine and the installation has not given us issues."
 

Cons

"There are some features lacking in ELK Elasticsearch."
"There are challenges with performance management and scalability."
"It was not possible to use authentication three years back. You needed to buy the product's services for authentication."
"From the UI point of view, we are using most probably Kibana, and I think they can do much better than that."
"We'd like more user-friendly integrations."
"Elastic Enterprise Search can improve by adding some kind of search that can be used out of the box without too much struggle with configuration."
"I would like to see more open source tools and testing as well as a signature analysis in the solution."
"Improving machine learning capabilities would be beneficial."
"This solution would benefit from the engine being made more lightweight."
"This solution would benefit from the engine being made more lightweight."
"Heavy use of scratch disk which sometimes leads to failure."
"IBM InfoSphere Information Server should be more scalable. It should have the option to change the configuration to run on a single, non-multiple node, or multi-threading processing."
"Their technical support needs improvement."
"Their technical support needs improvement."
"IBM InfoSphere Information Server should be more scalable. It should have the option to change the configuration to run on a single, non-multiple node, or multi-threading processing."
"There are certain shortcomings in the cloud side of the solution, where improvements are required."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are paying $1,500 a month to use the solution. If you want to have endpoint protection you need to pay more."
"The price could be better."
"We use the free version for some logs, but not extensive use."
"The solution is less expensive than Stackdriver and Grafana."
"​The pricing and license model are clear: node-based model."
"The tool is not expensive. Its licensing costs are yearly."
"The solution is not expensive because users have the option of choosing the managed or the subscription model."
"This product is open-source and can be used free of charge."
"The licensing cost of IBM InfoSphere Information Server depends on how many users there are."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Construction Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business39
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise47
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ELK Elasticsearch?
When it comes to pricing, I think we had to pay AWS approximately 1,000 to 1,200 per month for the overall stack. I am not quite certain about how much Elastic Search costs specifically because I w...
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
Elastic Search has many features, including Kibana and Logstash, which we regularly use. However, one downside in our product is cost, as it can be expensive when maintaining multiple shards and in...
What is your primary use case for ELK Elasticsearch?
As a developer, I use Elastic Search in developing one of my applications, basically integrating the back-end with Elastic Search. Our main use case for Elastic Search is for Logstash, which is a s...
What needs improvement with IBM InfoSphere Information Server?
We are using the on-premises version of IBM InfoSphere Information Server, but we feel that all new development is mainly for the cloud. We receive corrections of errors, but we do not see new func...
What is your primary use case for IBM InfoSphere Information Server?
My usual use case for IBM InfoSphere Information Server is ETL, where we take data from one source to another data warehouse solution.
What advice do you have for others considering IBM InfoSphere Information Server?
We are about to change our platform from IBM AIX to SUSE Linux, as our whole platform is changing, so everyone should change from IBM to SUSE Linux. It would be very difficult for us to have a diff...
 

Also Known As

Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
InfoSphere Information Server, IBM Information Server
 

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.
Canadian National Railway Company, Chickasaw Nation Division of Commerce, Swedish Armed Forces, BG RCI, Janata Sahakari Bank Ltd., University of Arizona, Biogrid Australia
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Search vs. IBM InfoSphere Information Server and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
894,738 professionals have used our research since 2012.