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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
6.7
Number of Reviews
72
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (10th), Vector Databases (3rd)
Solr
Ranking in Search as a Service
7th
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 19.3%, up from 10.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Solr is 5.4%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Search19.3%
Solr5.4%
Other75.3%
Search as a Service
 

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.
reviewer823641 - PeerSpot reviewer
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

"All the quality features are there. There are about 60 to 70 reports available."
"The ability to aggregate log and machine data into a searchable index reduces time to identify and isolate issues for an application. Saves time in triage and incident response by eliminating manual steps to access and parse logs on separate systems, within large infrastructure footprints."
"The full text search capabilities in Elastic Search have proven to be extremely valuable for our operations."
"It's a stable solution and we have not had any issues."
"The most valuable feature of Elastic Enterprise Search is the Discovery option for the visualization of logs on a GPU instead of on the server."
"The most valuable features are its user-friendly interface and seamless navigation."
"I like how it allows us to connect to Kafka and get this data in a document format very easily. Elasticsearch is very fast when you do text-based searches of documents. That area is very good, and the search is very good."
"The security portion of Elasticsearch is particularly beneficial, allowing me to view and analyze security alerts."
"It has improved our search ranking, relevancy, search performance, and user retention."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to perform a natural language search."
"​Sharding data, Faceting, Hit Highlighting, parent-child Block Join and Grouping, and multi-mode platform are all valuable features."
"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."
 

Cons

"The solution's integration and configuration are not easy. Not many people know exactly what to do."
"The real-time search functionality is not operational due to its impact on system resources."
"Performance improvement could come from skipping background refresh on search idle shards (which is already being addressed in the upcoming seventh version)."
"The GUI is the part of the program which has the most room for improvement."
"We have an issue with the volume of data that we can handle."
"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."
"Elastic Enterprise Search could improve its SSL integration easier. We should not need to go to the back-end servers to do configuration, we should be able to do it on the GUI."
"The performance for this solution, in terms of queries, could be improved."
"SolrCloud stability, indexing and commit speed, and real-time Indexing need improvement."
"It does take a little bit of effort to use and understand the solution. It would help us a lot if the solution offered up more documentation or tutorials to help with training or troubleshooting."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Elastic Enterprise is very, very competitive."
"We use the free version for some logs, but not extensive use."
"We are using the free open-sourced version of this solution."
"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."
"An X-Pack license is more affordable than Splunk."
"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 tool is an open-source product."
"We are paying $1,500 a month to use the solution. If you want to have endpoint protection you need to pay more."
"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
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Retailer
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise33
No data available
 

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...
Ask a question
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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: September 2025.
867,370 professionals have used our research since 2012.