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Elastic Search vs PostgreSQL comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

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 Vector Databases
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (9th), Search as a Service (1st)
PostgreSQL
Ranking in Vector Databases
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
125
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 4.9%, down from 7.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PostgreSQL is 5.0%, up from 3.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases
 

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.
PavithrarajShetty - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers simplicity and is cheaply priced
I haven't gone through the scalability aspect since I was using MySQL Server. I haven't worked to a high level in PostgreSQL, but with MySQL Server, I have managed clustering and partitioning. I think I haven't put much focus on PostgreSQL, so I am not sure how it behaves or how it works.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"You have dashboards, it is visual, there are maps, you can create canvases. It's more visual than anything that I've ever used."
"Data indexing of historical data is the most beneficial feature of the product."
"X-Pack provides good features, like authorization and alerts."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its utility and usefulness."
"The special text processing features in this solution are very important for me."
"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 analytics with Elastic benefits us due to the huge traffic volume in our organization, which reaches up to 60,000 requests per second. With logs of approximately 25 GB per day, manually analyzing traffic behavior, payloads, headers, user agents, and other details is impractical."
"Elasticsearch includes a graphical user interface (GUI) called Kibana. The GUI features are extremely beneficial to us."
"I find the solution to be fast."
"The PostgreSQL database is similar to the SQL Server but has a slightly different technology that has similar resources as well. If the customer has the confidence using SQL Server, they will be fairly comfortable using this solution."
"The community support and the open-source community for it are good."
"Scalable, stable, and easy to manage database system, with a straightforward installation."
"The solution is quite stable."
"It is easy to install and easy to manage. There is no license on it, so it is free. There is high compatibility with Oracle, and there are many tools for the migration of data from Oracle to Postgre."
"With the database, you can provide a multi-component at the same service with the same performance, scalability, or all those things."
"PostgreSQL has complete SQL dialects and is useful for writing sophisticated and complex queries. We have experience with Oracle database. My partner is experienced in DDA and he writes sophisticated SQL queries. The solution helps to get the job done in the best possible way. In today’s age, most developers do not have strong SQL knowledge or language command. They find it difficult to write even a SQL statement. These developers write cool queries which perform badly on the database end. As DBAs, we constantly urge the developers not to write bad queries, help them learn more, and write placebo commands."
"This is an open-source solution, operates at a high speed, and supports more than one SQL language."
 

Cons

"Both the graph feature and the reporting feature are a little bit lacking. The alerting also needs to be improved."
"Elasticsearch could be improved in terms of scalability."
"I found an issue with Elasticsearch in terms of aggregation. They are good, yet the rules written for this are not really good."
"The UI point of view is not very powerful because it is dependent on Kibana."
"The solution must provide AI integrations."
"There is a lack of technical people to develop, implement and optimize equipment operation and web queries."
"I have not been using the solution for many years to know exactly the improvements needed. However, they could simplify how the YML files have to be structured properly."
"I would rate the stability a seven out of ten. We faced a few issues."
"The user interface could be a bit better."
"It could be improved by using parallelization. You want basically, distributed computing."
"The interface could be much better."
"The search option is not very good."
"Postgres should focus on building a stronger knowledge base. They also need to expand their integration capabilities, so more tools and resources are available to manage it."
"It could be more secure."
"There could be a plugin to distribute the data on servers for the product."
"Instead of the installation agent downloading all the packages for the install, it should allow the user to download the packages separately on their own to do the install."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 pricing structure depends on the scalability steps."
"I rate Elastic Search's pricing an eight out of ten."
"This is a free, open source software (FOSS) tool, which means no cost on the front-end. There are no free lunches in this world though. Technical skill to implement and support are costly on the back-end with ELK, whether you train/hire internally or go for premium services from Elastic."
"We are using the open-sourced version."
"The solution is not expensive because users have the option of choosing the managed or the subscription model."
"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 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."
"Affordable solution."
"It is free, but if you need support, you can go for the commercial version called EnterpriseDB. They provide paid support, and they can even do hosting for you if you want standby and support."
"It is open source. There is no licensing."
"We do not pay for licensing."
"We are using the free version of PostgreSQL."
"The need for our customers to pay for licences is contingent on their projects and budgets."
"PostgreSQL is open-source, so if capable admins are available then the setup cost can be $0."
"The community version of Postgre is basically free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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?
We used the open-source version of Elasticsearch, which was free.
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
It would be useful if a feature for renaming indices could be added without affecting the performance of other features. However, overall, the consistency and stability of Elasticsearch are already...
How does Firebird SQL compare with PostgreSQL?
PostgreSQL was designed in a way that provides you with not only a high degree of flexibility but also offers you a cheap and easy-to-use solution. It gives you the ability to redesign and audit yo...
What do you like most about PostgreSQL?
It's a transactional database, so we use Postgres for most of our reporting. That's where it's helping.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PostgreSQL?
The tool is free of cost. For now, it's not about making money. But once we perfect it, we can offer it to customers willing to pay for support and other services. Most of my deployments are free.
 

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.
1. Apple 2. Cisco 3. Fujitsu 4. Instagram 5. Netflix 6. Red Hat 7. Sony 8. Uber 9. Cisco Systems 10. Skype 11. LinkedIn 12. Etsy 13. Yelp 14. Reddit 15. Dropbox 16. Slack 17. Twitch 18. WhatsApp 19. Snapchat 20. Shazam 21. SoundCloud 22. The New York Times 23. Cisco WebEx 24. Atlassian 25. Cisco Meraki 26. Heroku 27. GitLab 28. Zalando 29. OpenTable 30. Trello 31. Square Enix 32. Bloomberg
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Search vs. PostgreSQL and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
859,129 professionals have used our research since 2012.