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Amazon AWS CloudSearch vs Elastic Search 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

Amazon AWS CloudSearch
Ranking in Search as a Service
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Elastic Search
Ranking in Search as a Service
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
78
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (6th), Vector Databases (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2025, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS CloudSearch is 6.9%, down from 10.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 18.9%, up from 12.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Search18.9%
Amazon AWS CloudSearch6.9%
Other74.2%
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

AmrIssa - PeerSpot reviewer
A scalable and fully managed search service with diverse data type support and robust security
We use it as our hosting solution, serving as the backbone for our systems, which include Rubrik and SAP It is remarkably efficient and beneficial. A reboot should be enhanced. There are issues with the VBC collection. I have been working with it for four years. I would rate the stability ten…
Chandrakant Bharadwaj - PeerSpot reviewer
Boosted search efficiency through real-time querying and seamless indexing for high-volume product data
We are using AWS for our solutions. In AWS, we are heavily using Redshift and Glue. We focus more on vector searches and boosting the keywords, and all those features we are using heavily. In search, the key parameter that we boost up during indexing is essential. We self-implement Elastic Search in our e-commerce application. We are not currently doing a regex setup for RAG Playground, but there is a plan to do that. We are more into vector searches when it comes to how effectively the hybrid search capability meets our needs for combining traditional keyword and vector searches. Regarding the workflow, we are using the API for real-time inference because lots of data is being loaded at real-time on the application, and it is working well for us. I can definitely recommend Elastic Search to be used wherever you have consumer search capabilities needed in a large or scalable manner because it is very effective. I would rate Elastic Search an eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Document indexing, text-based search API, and Geospatial searches are all good features."
"It will remain alive in the market. The solution will be stable in the market."
"The quality of the solution is good."
"I've found the solution to be very scalable."
"The best feature is its scalability in that Cloud is always on the fly."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon AWS CloudSearch is the cloud aspect. I do not need to have the physical infrastructure, everything is in the cloud."
"It is remarkably efficient and beneficial."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"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 analytics with Elastic benefits us due to the huge traffic volume in our organization, which reaches up to 60,000 requests per second. With logs of approximately 25 GB per day, manually analyzing traffic behavior, payloads, headers, user agents, and other details is impractical."
"Elastic Search has impacted my organization positively as we use it for logging and APM."
"The UI is very nice, and performance wise it's quite good too."
"The search speed is most valuable and important."
"X-Pack provides good features, like authorization and alerts."
"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 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 Attack Discovery feature helps to dig into incidents from where they occurred to determine how the incident originated and its source; it gives an entire path of attack propagation, showing when it started, what happened, and all events that took place to connect the entire cyber incident."
 

Cons

"AWS CloudSearch's documentation isn't very clear. Also, the on-premise version of the solution is less stable than the cloud version."
"A reboot should be enhanced."
"Security is a concern but they're working on it."
"Regarding the period of propagation on CDN servers, sometimes we update photos or files and we don't see the update instantly. We need to wait for sometime."
"The price of the solution can be expensive."
"I do not have any suggestions for improvements at this time."
"I would say that it needs to keep its cost competitive in the market, especially in comparison to other clouds."
"Latlon data type only supports single value per document. All other types support multiple values. We faced issues with this because we had scenarios where, for each document, we needed to store multiple latlon values for different geographical locations."
"Elastic Search should provide better guides for developers."
"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."
"New Relic could be more flexible, similar to Elasticsearch."
"We'd like to see more integration in the future, especially around service desks or other ITSM tools."
"I have not been using the solution for many years to know exactly the improvements needed. However, they could simplify how the YML files have to be structured properly."
"The one area that can use improvement is the automapping of fields."
"There should be more stability."
"Elastic Search needs to improve its technical support. It should be customer-friendly and have good support."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our license costs around $4,000 per month."
"There was no license needed to use this solution."
"I'm not sure how much we pay a year. It might be around $30,000 a year."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one point is cheap, and ten points are expensive, I rate the pricing as medium or reasonable."
"Amazon AWS CloudSearch charging is based on how many resources you consume or and the solution is known to be a bit expensive."
"We chose AWS because of its cost and stability."
"In comparison to IBM and Microsoft, the pricing is more favorable."
"It can be expensive."
"We are using the free version and intend to upgrade."
"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 pricing structure depends on the scalability steps."
"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."
"There is a free version, and there is also a hosted version for which you have to pay. We're currently using the free version. If things go well, we might go for the paid version."
"Although the ELK Elasticsearch software is open-source, we buy the hardware."
"The price could be better."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
University
9%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise38
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon AWS CloudSearch?
In comparison to IBM and Microsoft, the pricing is more favorable. I would rate it eight out of ten.
What needs improvement with Amazon AWS CloudSearch?
A reboot should be enhanced. There are issues with the VBC collection.
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?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Elastic Search is overall fairly straightforward.
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
I have not explored Elastic Search at the most. Searching from vector DB is available in Elastic Search, and there is one more concept of graph searching or graph database searching. I have not exp...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

SmugMug
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.
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon AWS CloudSearch vs. Elastic Search and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
873,085 professionals have used our research since 2012.