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Elastic Search vs PostgreSQL comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
3.8
Organizations leverage Elastic Search for faster performance, cost efficiency, and seamless integration, significantly enhancing resource and time management.
Sentiment score
6.7
PostgreSQL offers cost savings and rapid ROI with free open-source capabilities, ideal for startups and growing enterprises.
We have not purchased any licensed products, and our use of Elastic Search is purely open-source, contributing positively to our ROI.
Software Engineer at Government of India
It is stable, and we do not encounter critical issues like server downtime, which could result in data loss.
SOC A2 at Innodata-ISOGEN
The main benefits observed from using Elastic Search include improvements in operational efficiency, along with cost, time, and resource savings.
Senior Devops Engineer at Ubique Digital LTD
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.4
Elastic Search's support is praised for responsiveness and helpfulness, with strong community resources and comprehensive documentation available.
Sentiment score
6.7
PostgreSQL support is strong with community forums, detailed documentation, and high-rated resources, offering both free and paid options.
For P1 tickets, they provide very immediate quick responses and join calls to support and troubleshoot the issue accordingly.
Elastic Engineer at The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI)
The customer support for Elastic Search is one of the best I have ever tried.
Software Developer at a media company with 10,001+ employees
They have always been really responsible and responsive to my requests.
Security Lead at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees
If PostgreSQL is hosted on cloud services such as Amazon RDS or Google Cloud SQL, the support is handled by the cloud provider, who provides automated backups, monitoring, infrastructure management, and technical support tickets.
Software Engineer at GSS Academy, Noida
Overall, we have a very small customer service team and a good engineering team with no overburden or bandwidth issues.
Data Science Architect at publicis Sapient
For customizations and extensions, the community is very active and useful.
Software Engineer – Rust Systems & AI Evaluation at Turing
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.2
Elastic Search provides scalable solutions praised for flexibility, though complex for large datasets, with satisfaction in performance and planning.
Sentiment score
7.4
PostgreSQL is highly scalable, handling large on-premise or cloud deployments effectively, supporting high transactions and growing user demands.
We can search through that document quite easily, sometimes in 7 milliseconds, sometimes one or two milliseconds.
Product Engineer at A3L
Performance tests involving one million requests at once, we encountered issues with shards and nodes not upscaling as needed, leading to crashes and minimal data loss.
Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
I would rate its scalability a ten.
Backend Developer
Now, we are doing the same level of transactions in PostgreSQL, around 100,000 transactions, and we are getting good throughput with no latency.
Data Science Architect at publicis Sapient
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Elastic Search is praised for stability, with minor issues under heavy load or poor query design, rated highly by users.
Sentiment score
8.0
PostgreSQL is praised for its stability and reliability, outperforming MySQL, with issues mainly from misconfiguration, not intrinsic faults.
The data transfer sometimes exceeded the bandwidth limits without proper notification, which caused issues.
SOC A2 at Innodata-ISOGEN
The stability of Elasticsearch was very high.
Backend Developer
When you put one keyword, everything related to that keyword in your ecosystem will showcase all the results.
Chief Information Security Officer at CDSL Ventures Limited
I have never seen any performance issue in PostgreSQL.
Data Science Architect at publicis Sapient
 

Room For Improvement

Elastic Search needs better mapping, scalability, AI integration, pricing, support, documentation, usability, and intuitive interfaces for improved user experience.
PostgreSQL users seek improvements in interface, performance, scalability, integration, documentation, and support for large-scale real-time applications.
From a technical point of view, there are no significant issues recalled as Elastic Search has been absolutely awesome for this use case and covers 100% of the needs.
Principal Scientific Computing Software Engineer at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees
If I need to parse one million records saved into Elastic Search, it becomes a nightmare because I need to do the pagination, and it is very problematic in that regard.
Lead Engineer at Spidersilk
Observability features like search latency, indexing rate, and maybe rejected requests should be added to make the platform more reliable and accessible for everyone.
Senior System Engineer at EPAM Systems
PostgreSQL remains a strong choice for enterprise applications due to its stability, extensibility, and SQL standards compliance.
Software Engineer – Rust Systems & AI Evaluation at Turing
Query optimization improves slow queries by using proper indexes, avoiding unnecessary joins, and using EXPLAIN ANALYZE to inspect query plans.
Software Engineer at GSS Academy, Noida
If I need to increase the dimension to 3,000 or 5,000, that option should be available.
Data Science Architect at publicis Sapient
 

Setup Cost

Elastic Search offers free open-source and paid plans with varied pricing, noted for both complexity and scalability.
PostgreSQL offers cost-effective scalability and flexibility with zero licensing fees, though setup and support may incur additional costs.
On the AWS side, it is very expensive because they charge based on query basis or how much data is transferred in and out, making it very expensive.
Lead Engineer at Spidersilk
Having the hosted solution and not having to pay for essentially a DevOps person on staff to manage makes it affordable.
CTO at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
You can host it on-premises, which would incur zero cost, or take it as a SaaS-based service, where the expenses remain minimal.
Senior Software Engineer at Agoda
Even with doing 100,000 transactions right now within PostgreSQL, we are happy with PostgreSQL and not seeing that it is expensive or going out of budget.
Data Science Architect at publicis Sapient
The managed PostgreSQL itself is open source with no license fees.
Software Engineer – Rust Systems & AI Evaluation at Turing
 

Valuable Features

Elastic Search offers high search capabilities, scalability, real-time efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and seamless integration with tools like Kibana.
PostgreSQL excels in spatial support, high availability, JSONB handling, integration, scalability, and community-driven advanced features for diverse applications.
Elastic Search makes handling large data volumes efficient and supports complex search operations.
Software Engineer at Government of India
The most valuable feature of Elasticsearch was the quick search capability, allowing us to search by any criteria needed.
Backend Developer
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.
Director, Software Engineering at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
PostgreSQL improves reliability, performance, and scalability in production. Since it is ACID compliant, it ensures that database transactions are safe and consistent, preventing partial data updates, maintaining data integrity, and allowing multiple users to read or write data simultaneously using MVCC.
Software Engineer at GSS Academy, Noida
The best feature is performance, because of which I decided on PostgreSQL.
Data Science Architect at publicis Sapient
Its robustness and reliability are incredible and stable, which is crucial for critical data, especially with AI model outputs.
Software Engineer – Rust Systems & AI Evaluation at Turing
 

Categories and Ranking

Elastic Search
Ranking in Vector Databases
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
100
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (5th), Search as a Service (1st)
PostgreSQL
Ranking in Vector Databases
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
128
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 5.1%, up from 4.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PostgreSQL is 9.2%, up from 5.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Elastic Search5.1%
PostgreSQL9.2%
Other85.7%
Vector Databases
 

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.
Shobhit Goel - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Science Architect at publicis Sapient
High-volume transactions have reduced failures and improve customer service efficiency
The best feature is performance, because of which I decided on PostgreSQL. I have also enabled the PG vector plugin on top of PostgreSQL. I have the opportunity to use two different features and two different flavors in a single product, which is the best thing about PostgreSQL. Initially, we had some hiccups around the performance part, but later we did indexing in PostgreSQL and now it is working very well. Even when we are doing 100,000 transactions in a day, PostgreSQL is working excellently. The interface is another best feature. If I need to do any query, I simply install the plugin on my local, which is pgAdmin. Through pgAdmin, I am able to communicate with PostgreSQL and execute all my SQL queries. I am getting a better UI with PostgreSQL as the backend, which is also one of the best options. PG vector is also very strong from PostgreSQL where I have implemented RAG and on a daily basis, I inject thousands of pages of PDF. More than 100 PDFs are coming into my system and one PDF is around 1,000 pages. We are injecting them into PostgreSQL and converting them into dimensions and inserting them into PG vector. The level of transactions we are doing on a daily basis is substantial, and we are getting very good throughput and low latency from PostgreSQL. When we were doing more than 50,000 transactions in a minute with the previous database, we were getting a lot of latency issues with threads getting blocked and abruptly closed unwantedly. After doing extensive research, we decided to move to PostgreSQL. Now, we are doing around 100,000 transactions in PostgreSQL and we are getting good throughput with no latency.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business40
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise50
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business58
Midsize Enterprise26
Large Enterprise49
 

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...
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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PostgreSQL?
I am not directly involved in the licensing or procurement decisions, so I cannot comment in detail on the price. From an engineering perspective, PostgreSQL is cost-efficient because it is open so...
What needs improvement with PostgreSQL?
While improving reliability, I have noticed that the limitations in PostgreSQL can be complex. For large-scale deployments, configuration, performance tuning, and related tasks can be complex and i...
 

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 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.