Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

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
6.6
Number of Reviews
82
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (8th), 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 December 2025, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 19.1%, up from 13.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Solr is 4.6%, down from 6.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Search19.1%
Solr4.6%
Other76.3%
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

MichaelSmith9 - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Unified search has powered feature‑driven research with minimal maintenance overhead
We haven't had the opportunity to use the hybrid search with Elastic Search yet. I think there's a place for it in our long-term solution, but we're not quite there yet. We haven't yet used any AI features built into Elastic Search. To do what we want to do with Elastic Search, the queries can get complex and require a fuller understanding of the DSL. Once we start to build that understanding, it's another muscle we have, so it's not a bad thing, but it just takes a while to get up and running with expertise for our engineers. It's not hard to learn how to use more complex things in Elastic Search; it's just a challenge we're going to face.
reviewer823641 - 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 most valuable feature is the out of the box Kibana."
"The tool's stability and performance are good."
"The stability of Elasticsearch was very high, and I would rate it a ten."
"The initial setup is very easy for small environments."
"The security portion of Elasticsearch is particularly beneficial, allowing me to view and analyze security alerts."
"Elastic Search has impacted my organization positively as we use it for logging and APM."
"The product is scalable with good performance."
"The most valuable feature for us is the analytics that we can configure and view using Kibana."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"There are potential improvements based on our client feedback, like unifying the licensing cost structure."
"I would like to see more integration for the solution with different platforms."
"Scalability and ROI are the areas they have to improve."
"They could improve some of the platform's infrastructure management capabilities."
"The UI point of view is not very powerful because it is dependent on Kibana."
"The documentation for Elastic Search can be challenging if you're not already familiar with the platform."
"The reports could improve."
"Elasticsearch could be improved in terms of scalability."
"SolrCloud stability, indexing and commit speed, and real-time Indexing need improvement."
"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."
"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."
"The performance for this solution, in terms of queries, could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is less expensive than Stackdriver and Grafana."
"The pricing structure depends on the scalability steps."
"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 tool is an open-source product."
"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."
"This product is open-source and can be used free of charge."
"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."
"It can move from $10,000 US Dollars per year to any price based on how powerful you need the searches to be and the capacity in terms of storage and process."
"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."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Search as a Service solutions are best for your needs.
879,310 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

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

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise41
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?
Elastic Search's pricing totally depends on the server. Managed services from AWS are used, and we have worked on a self-managed Elastic Search cluster. On the AWS side, it is very expensive becaus...
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
Elastic Search has an annoying limitation regarding page size. It has a specific limit for queries on Elastic Search, and the default is ten thousand, and we can increase it. However, after increas...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

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: December 2025.
879,310 professionals have used our research since 2012.