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Elastic Search pros and cons

Vendor: Elastic

4.1 out of 5

78 reviews
97% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

Elastic Search efficiently scales with the cluster node model and excels in handling large volumes of unstructured data. X-Pack adds features like authorization, AI attribute tagging, and alerts, enhancing usability and security. Despite high-speed indexing and real-time analytics, the licensing model, integration with platforms, and customer support need improvement. Machine learning improvements for search and integration challenges highlight areas for growth, especially for users without internet connectivity.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Elastic Search offers robust scalability and can manage large volumes of data efficiently, allowing users to scale performance by adding machines.

Its powerful analytics and machine learning capabilities facilitate the identification of trends and anomalies, making it ideal for various enterprise needs.

Elasticsearch is highly valued for its speed and efficiency in handling text-based searches and indexing, ensuring quick data retrieval and processing.

Security features and real-time search functionality enhance operational decision-making and support efficient management of security alerts and incidents.

Log collection and storage are optimized with high indexing capabilities, allowing detailed and comprehensive analysis of large-scale log data.

CONS

Enterprise scaling of essentially separate, free open source software products has been a challenge, prompting Elastic to publish new add-ons to aid scaling.

Machine learning needs improvement, and the absence of email notification comparable to Logentries influenced some users to switch.

Licensing issues arise as Elastic does not offer a perpetual license, requiring annual subscriptions and counting nodes, thus posing obstacles for specific sectors.

Backwards compatibility concerns exist, with features being removed without accommodating existing customer setups and causing adaptation difficulties.

Elasticsearch could benefit from better documentation, more informative official resources, and enhanced support for customization efforts.

Elastic Search Pros review quotes

ED

Owner & director at Pulsar ICT

Jun 18, 2020

There's lots of processing power. You can actually just add machines to get more performance if you need to. It's pretty flexible and very easy to add another log. It's not like 'oh, no, it's going to be so much extra data'. That's not a problem for the machine. It can handle it.

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KB

Chief Data Scientist at Everlytics Data Science Pte Ltd

Nov 30, 2020

ELK Elasticsearch is 100% scalable as scalability is built into the design

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Enterprise Architect at DXC Technology

Jul 18, 2024

All the quality features are there. There are about 60 to 70 reports available.

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LK

Senior Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Sep 22, 2022

The solution has great scalability.

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Cloud and Big Data Engineer | Developer at Huawei

Nov 20, 2023

A good use case is saving metadata of your systems for data cataloging. Various systems, like those opened in metadata and similar applications, use Elasticsearch to store their text data.

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EG

Security Lead at Brevo

Oct 6, 2025

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.

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PO

PHILIP OLANIYAN

Relationship Manager at Snapnet Ltd

Jan 8, 2024

It provides deep visibility into your cloud and distributed applications, from microservices to serverless architectures. It quickly identifies and resolves the root causes of issues, like gaining visibility into all the cloud-based and on-prem applications.

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Dave Ezrakhovich

Site Reliability Engineering at WiseTech Global

Nov 15, 2023

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.

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reviewer1654356

Chief Consultant at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 21, 2025

Elastic Search has impacted my organization positively as we use it for logging and APM.

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KR

Head of Technology Operations at a financial services firm with 11-50 employees

Oct 30, 2020

The most valuable feature is the out of the box Kibana.

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Elastic Search Cons review quotes

ED

Owner & director at Pulsar ICT

Jun 18, 2020

The solution has quite a steep learning curve. The usability and general user-friendliness could be improved. However, that is kind of typical with products that have a lot of flexibility, or a lot of capabilities. Sometimes having more choices makes things more complex. It makes it difficult to configure it, though. It's kind of a bitter pill that you have to swallow in the beginning and you really have to get through it.

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KB

Chief Data Scientist at Everlytics Data Science Pte Ltd

Nov 30, 2020

The metadata gets stored along with indexes and isn't queryable.

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Enterprise Architect at DXC Technology

Jul 18, 2024

Scalability and ROI are the areas they have to improve.

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Free Report: Elastic Search Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Elastic Search. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: October 2025.

872,098 professionals have used our research since 2012.

LK

Senior Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Sep 22, 2022

Both the graph feature and the reporting feature are a little bit lacking. The alerting also needs to be improved.

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Cloud and Big Data Engineer | Developer at Huawei

Nov 20, 2023

There are challenges with performance management and scalability.

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EG

Security Lead at Brevo

Oct 6, 2025

What they need is to be more transparent about the actual setup of the cluster and the deployment process.

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PO

PHILIP OLANIYAN

Relationship Manager at Snapnet Ltd

Jan 8, 2024

There are potential improvements based on our client feedback, like unifying the licensing cost structure.

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Dave Ezrakhovich

Site Reliability Engineering at WiseTech Global

Nov 15, 2023

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.

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reviewer1654356

Chief Consultant at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 21, 2025

The documentation for Elastic Search can be challenging if you're not already familiar with the platform.

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KR

Head of Technology Operations at a financial services firm with 11-50 employees

Oct 30, 2020

I would like to be able to do correlations between multiple indexes.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 73)

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