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Elastic Search vs OpenText Knowledge Discovery (IDOL) comparison

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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
6.5
Number of Reviews
100
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Integration (8th), Search as a Service (1st), Vector Databases (6th)
OpenText Knowledge Discover...
Ranking in Indexing and Search
5th
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 November 2026, in the Indexing and Search category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 9.6%, down from 18.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenText Knowledge Discovery (IDOL) is 6.6%, down from 7.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Indexing and Search Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Elastic Search9.6%
OpenText Knowledge Discovery (IDOL)6.6%
Other83.8%
Indexing and Search
 

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.
ERICK RAMIREZ - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead Solutions Architect at IMEXPERTS DO BRASIL
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

"Elastic Search makes handling large data volumes efficient and supports complex search operations."
"We had many reasons to implement Elasticsearch for search term solutions. Elasticsearch products provide enterprise landscape support for different areas of the company."
"All the quality features are there. There are about 60 to 70 reports available."
"The solution has a lot of features; they have machine learning jobs they can implement, I'm not there yet, but I can use anomaly detection to see there are various processes that can find users that aren't supposed to log onto certain machines."
"The initial installation and setup were straightforward."
"The pricing and license model are clear: node-based model."
"I appreciate that Elastic Enterprise Search is easy to use and that we have people on our team who are able to manage it effectively."
"This is a very rich product, and it's got a very wide functionality, and a wide range of functionalities which I don't see in the other products, especially not in the cheaper ones."
"Speed improvements over older Fetch architecture."
"Enterprise search success (finding what documents you're looking for) has gone up over 30% with users finding their hit on the first page of results as opposed to the 2,3,4th or giving up entirely."
"IDOL has several important visual analytics, like face recognition and object detection and recognition."
"Capability of processing and analysing unstructured data, like audio and video analysis."
"IDOL is a scalable solution: If a client needs to process more unstructured media content, they can scale IDOL both linearly and vertically, and you can scale this solution very easily."
"Satisfaction and ability to find relevant content has increased over 50% based on our before and after survey results."
 

Cons

"This solution is stable, but at times the stack will freeze and you have to remove and recreate the cluster."
"The initial configuration could be easier; at first, the learning curve is a little high, and over time, it becomes easier."
"Machine learning on search needs improvement."
"There should be more stability."
"Pagination in Elastic Search is very slow."
"The documentation regarding customization could be better."
"I would rate the stability a seven out of ten. We faced a few issues."
"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."
"Understanding how to optimize Lua Scripting configuration to improve performance. Lua Scripts added to a CFS configuration can cause the CFS processing to slow down, if the scripts are not scoped to only run against specific indexing jobs or database content."
"IDOL's tech support needs improvement."
"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."
"On-premise implementation and installation is very complicated."
"Technical support could improve a lot."
"The interface needs to be mobile friendly, which I understand is in the backlog of future improvements."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate Elastic Search's pricing an eight out of ten."
"This product is open-source and can be used free of charge."
"The price could be better."
"The price of Elastic Enterprise is very, very competitive."
"The solution is free."
"Although the ELK Elasticsearch software is open-source, we buy the hardware."
"The premium license is expensive."
"It can be expensive."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Construction Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business40
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise50
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ELK Elasticsearch?
The pricing for Elastic Search is mainly budgeted according to the organization budget, so we take it as a yearly subscription, and that is acceptable since we do get a fair discount when we are ta...
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
When we get the logs, it is mostly about how we edit the configurations and how we make changes according to the requirements of our organization. In these cases, the logs sometimes can be a bit in...
What is your primary use case for ELK Elasticsearch?
I am the Elastic Search admin for my organization, and we are using Elastic Search to handle the traffic to GCP. The monitoring of all the clusters and all the deployments are quite good, and compa...
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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: November 2026.
920,939 professionals have used our research since 2012.