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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
6.6
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (9th), Search as a Service (1st)
PostgreSQL
Ranking in Vector Databases
12th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
125
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 4.5%, down from 6.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PostgreSQL is 5.4%, up from 3.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Search4.5%
PostgreSQL5.4%
Other90.1%
Vector Databases
 

Featured Reviews

Louis McCoy - PeerSpot reviewer
Searches through billions of documents have become impressively fast and consistent
The seamless scalability is something I see as among the best features Elastic Search offers. 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. I find configuring relevant searches within Elastic Search platform very straightforward. Elastic Search is easily scalable. The customer support for Elastic Search is quite good. I advise others looking into using Elastic Search to think about the future of your platform and where you intend it to be in five years, and based on that, which version of Elastic Search best suits the needs of your platform. Additionally, jump into the AI products first as you're in the planning phase so that as you're filling out your data, the AI products and machine learning products can enrich the data real-time early on in the process, which will save you a lot of time later. The overall performance of the platform, scalability of the platform and other additional features, especially when it comes to AI, really earn the nine.
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

"It is easy to scale with the cluster node model.​"
"We had many reasons to implement Elasticsearch for search term solutions. Elasticsearch products provide enterprise landscape support for different areas of the company."
"The solution is very good with no issues or glitches."
"The products comes with REST APIs."
"My favorite feature is the ease of use, particularly in how you integrate the agent; I've been using it since version 7, and we're on version 9 now, and I've seen the progress from using Beats to using the agent, making it so simple today to enroll a server with the Elastic Agent."
"The solution offers good stability."
"The initial setup is very easy for small environments."
"It is stable."
"The solution has many valuable features such as it easy to use and the interface is intuitive."
"The solution provides complete support in terms of the SQL dialect and behaves nicely when it comes to transactions."
"The performance is good."
"It's a standard reliable database management system."
"The product is quite flexible."
"Initial setup is simple."
"Clustering will be the number 1 feature. It is also open-source so it is free. It can also be clustered, to allow fault tolerance."
"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."
 

Cons

"There should be more stability."
"I would rate the stability a seven out of ten. We faced a few issues."
"Elastic Search needs to improve authentication. It also needs to work on the Kibana visualization dashboard."
"The pricing of this product needs to be more clear because I cannot understand it when I review the website."
"It was not possible to use authentication three years back. You needed to buy the product's services for authentication."
"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."
"I found an issue with Elasticsearch in terms of aggregation. They are good, yet the rules written for this are not really good."
"They should improve its documentation. Their official documentation is not very informative. They can also improve their technical support. They don't help you much with the customized stuff. They also need to add more visuals. Currently, they have line charts, bar charts, and things like that, and they can add more types of visuals. They should also improve the alerts. They are not very simple to use and are a bit complex. They could add more options to the alerting system."
"PostgreSQL uses high memory compared to its counterparts when a highly demanding load is involved, especially one that makes many concurrent connections to the database."
"There are several features I would like to improve that aren't working as expected. It's likely that the latest version is doing something that was missed in the previous versions. For example, the output parameters — the stored procedures — is something new in PostgreSQL that Firebird has already had for a long time."
"The search option is not very good."
"I'd like to see better memory management. I think that that's one of the few areas that Postgres does not handle as well as MySQL does or did."
"A better graphic user-interface would be nice to see."
"PostgreSQL could improve by adding data warehousing tools."
"The price could be better."
"The performance of PostgreSQL could improve."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"We are using the Community Edition because Elasticsearch's licensing model is not flexible or suitable for us. They ask for an annual subscription. We also got the development consultancy from Elasticsearch for 60 days or something like that, but they were just trying to do the same trick. That's why we didn't purchase it. We are just using the Community Edition."
"We are using the free version and intend to upgrade."
"We are using the open-sourced version."
"The pricing structure depends on the scalability steps."
"The price could be better."
"​The pricing and license model are clear: node-based model."
"Although the ELK Elasticsearch software is open-source, we buy the hardware."
"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."
"The licensing model is good."
"It is free. There is no license on it."
"It is also open-source so it is free."
"It is an open-source platform."
"The tool is cheaply priced compared to other RDBMS providers in the market."
"PostgreSQL is a free and open-source database."
"Affordable solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
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
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise36
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business58
Midsize Enterprise26
Large Enterprise45
 

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?
Elastic Search could improve in areas such as search criteria and query processes, as search times were longer prior to implementing Elastic Search. Elastic Search has limitations for handling huge...
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: September 2025.
869,202 professionals have used our research since 2012.