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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 (5th), 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 September 2026, in the Indexing and Search category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 9.4%, down from 21.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenText Knowledge Discovery (IDOL) is 6.2%, down from 7.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Indexing and Search Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Elastic Search9.4%
OpenText Knowledge Discovery (IDOL)6.2%
Other84.4%
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

"It is a stable and good platform."
"The most valuable features are the data store and the X-pack extension."
"The solution has improved our organization by allowing us to quickly search data from multiple systems saving valuable time."
"The Attack Discovery feature helps to dig into incidents from where they occurred to determine how the incident originated and its source; it gives an entire path of attack propagation, showing when it started, what happened, and all events that took place to connect the entire cyber incident."
"The most valuable features are the ease and speed of the setup."
"The forced merge and forced resonate features reduce the data size increasing reliability."
"The tool's stability and performance are good."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its utility and usefulness."
"Satisfaction and ability to find relevant content has increased over 50% based on our before and after survey results."
"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."
"Capability of processing and analysing unstructured data, like audio and video analysis."
"Speed improvements over older Fetch architecture."
"IDOL has several important visual analytics, like face recognition and object detection and recognition."
"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."
 

Cons

"Enterprise scaling of what have been essentially separate, free open source software (FOSS) products has been a challenge, but the folks at Elastic have published new add-ons (X-Pack and ECE) to help large companies grow ELK to required scales."
"The initial configuration could be easier; at first, the learning curve is a little high, and over time, it becomes easier."
"It would be useful to include an assistant into Kibana for recommendations, advice, tutorials, or things that can help improve my daily work with Elastic Search."
"Its licensing needs to be improved. They don't offer a perpetual license. They want to know how many nodes you will be using, and they ask for an annual subscription. Otherwise, they don't give you permission to use it. Our customers are generally military or police departments or customers without connection to the internet. Therefore, this model is not suitable for us. This subscription-based model is not the best for OEM vendors. Another annoying thing about Elasticsearch is its roadmap. We are developing something, and then they say, "Okay. We have removed that feature in this release," and when we are adapting to that release, they say, "Okay. We have removed that one as well." We don't know what they will remove in the next version. They are not looking for backward compatibility from the customers' perspective. They just remove a feature and say, "Okay. We've removed this one." In terms of new features, it should have an ODBC driver so that you can search and integrate this product with existing BI tools and reporting tools. Currently, you need to go for third parties, such as CData, in order to achieve this. ODBC driver is the most important feature required. Its Community Edition does not have security features. For example, you cannot authenticate with a username and password. It should have security features. They might have put it in the latest release."
"In terms of product improvement, ratio aggregation is not supported in this solution."
"Elastic Search could benefit from a more user-friendly onboarding process for beginners."
"I know many customers who lost their data and could not recover it."
"To do what we want to do with Elastic Search, the queries can get complex and require a fuller understanding of the DSL."
"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."
"Technical support could improve a lot."
"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."
"IDOL's tech support needs improvement."
"The interface needs to be mobile friendly, which I understand is in the backlog of future improvements."
"On-premise implementation and installation is very complicated."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the free version and intend to upgrade."
"An X-Pack license is more affordable than Splunk."
"To access all the features available you require both the open source license and the production license."
"Although the ELK Elasticsearch software is open-source, we buy the hardware."
"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 pricing model is questionable and needs to be addressed because when you would like to have the security they charge per machine."
"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 price of Elasticsearch is fair. It is a more expensive solution, like QRadar. The price for Elasticsearch is not much more than other solutions we have."
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
7%
Construction Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
11%
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: September 2026.
914,109 professionals have used our research since 2012.