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Elastic Search vs Solr comparison

 

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 Search as a Service
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
96
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (5th), Vector Databases (2nd)
Solr
Ranking in Search as a Service
10th
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 17.6%, up from 15.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Solr is 5.1%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Elastic Search17.6%
Solr5.1%
Other77.3%
Search as a Service
 

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.
it_user823641 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Search Engineer at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees
The Natural Language Search capability is helpful and intuitive for our users
The initial setup is complex because this is a distributed system, and you have to make sure that every individual node is aware of every other node in existence. This search engine has a large capacity, so you need to make sure that there is enough buffer space. We took one month to deploy and perform a fresh setup. Our strategy was to start with a local data center, before venturing into cross data center replicas. A staff size of two to four people is suitable for deploying and maintaining the solution, depending upon the scale. They would set up the solution and put monitoring in place for the indexing jobs, as well as design the schema so that the data can feed well.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution offers good stability."
"It is highly valuable because of its simplicity in maintenance, where most tasks are handled for you, and it offers a plethora of built-in features."
"The most valuable features are the data store and the X-pack extension."
"The product is scalable with good performance."
"Elastic Search is very user-friendly, and we can easily integrate it with third-party models and other AWS S3 buckets."
"The tool's stability and performance are good."
"The pricing and license model are clear: node-based model."
"Even compared to Splunk, Elastic Search has a good easy-to-use user interface, as even non-technical people can easily search and easily observe the logs and easily track the applications."
"It has improved our search ranking, relevancy, search performance, and user retention."
"It has improved our search ranking, relevancy, search performance, and user retention."
"This is an infinitely scalable product with state-of-the-art technology, and the value of Natural Language Search is tremendous."
"One of the best aspects of the solution is the indexing. It's already indexed to all the fields in the category. We don't need to spend so much extra effort to do the indexing. It's great."
"One of the best aspects of the solution is the indexing; it's already indexed to all the fields in the category, so we don't need to spend so much extra effort to do the indexing, which is great."
"We use Solr to index over 600k documents; it's very fast, flexible to use, and the speed of indexing individual documents has been great."
"​Sharding data, Faceting, Hit Highlighting, parent-child Block Join and Grouping, and multi-mode platform are all valuable features."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to perform a natural language search."
 

Cons

"I see that there are areas in Elastic Search that have room for improvement, such as user documentation and onboarding processes."
"We had initially planned to expand use of ELK because of its cheap price and the services that are included, but given the difficulty with implementation we've decided to go with Nagios instead."
"They could improve some of the platform's infrastructure management capabilities."
"This product could be improved with additional security, and the addition of support for machine learning devices."
"It was not possible to use authentication three years back. You needed to buy the product's services for authentication."
"While integrating with tools like agents for ingesting data from sources like firewalls is valuable, I believe prioritizing improvements to the core product would be more beneficial."
"To do what we want to do with Elastic Search, the queries can get complex and require a fuller understanding of the DSL."
"Elastic Search needs to improve authentication. It also needs to work on the Kibana visualization dashboard."
"Memory utilization could be better but it is an industrial strength tool so some overhead is to be expected."
"With increased sharding, performance degrades. Merger, when present, is a bottle-neck. Peer-to-peer sync has issues in SolrCloud when index is incrementally updated."
"Encountered issues with both master-slave and SolrCloud. Indexing and serving traffic from same collection has very poor performance. Some components are slow for searching."
"The solution's grammar and syntax should be easier."
"The performance for this solution, in terms of queries, could be improved."
"Encountered issues with both master-slave and SolrCloud. Indexing and serving traffic from same collection has very poor performance; some components are slow for searching."
"SolrCloud stability, indexing and commit speed, and real-time Indexing need improvement."
"The performance for this solution, in terms of queries, could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is free."
"ELK has been considered as an alternative to Splunk to reduce licensing costs."
"An X-Pack license is more affordable than Splunk."
"The tool is not expensive. Its licensing costs are yearly."
"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."
"The premium license is expensive."
"It can be expensive."
"The price could be better."
"The only costs in addition to the standard licensing fees are related to the hardware, depending on whether it is cloud-based, or on-premise."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business39
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise47
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ELK Elasticsearch?
When it comes to pricing, I think we had to pay AWS approximately 1,000 to 1,200 per month for the overall stack. I am not quite certain about how much Elastic Search costs specifically because I w...
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
Elastic Search has many features, including Kibana and Logstash, which we regularly use. However, one downside in our product is cost, as it can be expensive when maintaining multiple shards and in...
What is your primary use case for ELK Elasticsearch?
As a developer, I use Elastic Search in developing one of my applications, basically integrating the back-end with Elastic Search. Our main use case for Elastic Search is for Logstash, which is a s...
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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.
eHarmony, Sears, StubHub, Best Buy, Instagram, Netflix, Disney, AT&T, eBay, AOL, Bloomberg, Comcast, Ticketmaster, Travelocity, MTV Networks
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Search vs. Solr and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.