No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Amazon AWS CloudSearch 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

Amazon AWS CloudSearch
Ranking in Search as a Service
9th
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
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 April 2026, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS CloudSearch is 5.3%, down from 9.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Solr is 4.9%, down from 6.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon AWS CloudSearch5.3%
Solr4.9%
Other89.8%
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

HarishMahanta - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr PeopleSoft Consultant at People Tech
A reasonably priced solution that provides scalability, stability, reliability, and security
In terms of what needs improvement, I would say that it needs to keep its cost competitive in the market, especially in comparison to other clouds. Let's say we have various clouds in the market, like Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and AWS Cloud. However, security-wise, I don't think AWS is bad. It's good only, especially in comparison to Oracle Cloud, if you really use Oracle, while also considering the fact that PeopleSoft is an Oracle product. AWS is a separate cloud, and Oracle has its own cloud. If you are in a new PeopleSoft and Oracle and you are using a third-party cloud, it means it is not easy since we can't think it is easy. I mean, if you are using Oracle products and you are using Oracle Cloud, it will be easier for you. However, it has a cost in comparison to AWS. Oracle Cloud is too costly. According to region, we segregate because it depends on the organization's strength. Let's say your organization has 1,000 customers. In that case, on a daily basis, let's say one customer was released or discontinued using the product. Then, you have to remove the solution. However, if you use Oracle Cloud, that space will remain there. In the case of AWS, they will immediately cut down their space, meaning in terms of reuse ability, it will reduce the cost. In our case, AWS is the best in the market, actually. We have various clouds like Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure Cloud, the features of which are very different. There are a lot of features in AWS Cloud since I am not in the market providing service on the products. I am just using that tool to access our clients' database and deliver our day-to-day service. I interact with the clients regarding their issues, whatever they are facing. There is this one kind of interface we use to access things because they are in AWS Cloud. If your customer is in Oracle Cloud, then there will be a different approach to accessing it. In our case, we can use AWS or Oracle, so it doesn't matter to us.
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

"It's the best solution for any company. It has a hosting ERP system for any task. AWS is stable. AWS is more flexible and its elastic concept is a new concept. AWS is also very secure. It has many layers of security, like hardware security and software security. This is a big issue."
"Document indexing, text-based search API, and Geospatial searches are all good features."
"It's the best solution for any company; it has a hosting ERP system for any task, AWS is stable, more flexible with its elastic concept, and also very secure with many layers of hardware and software security."
"There are plenty of services from the database, with many valuable features, good scalability and agility, okay pricing, good solution quality, strong optimization, and customization that can work with any other cloud platforms."
"It is remarkably efficient and beneficial."
"The best feature is its scalability in that Cloud is always on the fly."
"AWS CloudSearch's best features are good performance under high CPU and memory use, and ease of deployment and scaling."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon AWS CloudSearch is its ability to receive data quickly. You can access your data easily in a short time."
"​Sharding data, Faceting, Hit Highlighting, parent-child Block Join and Grouping, and multi-mode platform are all valuable features."
"It has improved our search ranking, relevancy, search performance, and user retention."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to perform a natural language search."
"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, so we don't need to spend so much extra effort to do the indexing, which is great."
 

Cons

"Amazon AWS CloudSearch is highly stable. However, the speed depends on your internet connection."
"A reboot should be enhanced."
"AWS CloudSearch's documentation isn't very clear. Also, the on-premise version of the solution is less stable than the cloud version."
"Index cleanup is sometimes painful. No easy way to clean indexes or a bulk of documents. Full indexing or regeneration of entire indexes sometimes gets stuck. In one instance, we had to delete the entire index and re-create it."
"Security is a concern but they're working on it."
"Security is a concern but they're working on it."
"Amazon AWS CloudSearch is highly stable. However, the speed depends on your internet connection."
"Amazon's technical support needs to improve as they only solve about half our problems."
"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."
"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."
"The solution's grammar and syntax should be easier."
"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."
"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

"We chose AWS because of its cost and stability."
"There was no license needed to use this solution."
"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."
"In comparison to IBM and Microsoft, the pricing is more favorable."
"Amazon AWS CloudSearch charging is based on how many resources you consume or and the solution is known to be a bit expensive."
"Our license costs around $4,000 per month."
"I'm not sure how much we pay a year. It might be around $30,000 a year."
"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.
885,728 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Marketing Services Firm
6%
Computer Software Company
14%
Retailer
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise6
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

SmugMug
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 Amazon AWS CloudSearch vs. Solr and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,728 professionals have used our research since 2012.