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Amazon Kendra 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 Kendra
Ranking in Search as a Service
2nd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Elastic Search
Ranking in Search as a Service
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
66
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (11th), Vector Databases (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon Kendra is 19.3%, down from 22.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 13.9%, up from 7.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

AM
Kendra has a nice AI built-in, enhancing the search experience and highly stable solution
There are many valuable features. For example, there are many documents that contain a lot of legal information. So we want to understand whether all the documents have the required complaint-related information or not, and whether they are following the standard policies of documentation. We have multiple documents, so we don't know which document has the sought-after information. Therefore, we want to perform an enterprise search on it. So there are a lot of use cases we are trying to build using these newer technologies, specifically Kendra. Moreover, Kendra has AI, which has an upper edge, and that is really helpful. It has a nice AI inbuilt, which improves the search part of it.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Provides flexibility to tune the relevance and ranking of results."
"We have good use cases where stability is everything. So it's a stable solution."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its utility and usefulness."
"The special text processing features in this solution are very important for me."
"It's a stable solution and we have not had any issues."
"The solution has great scalability."
"Using real-time search functionality to support operational decisions has been helpful."
"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."
"It helps us to analyse the logs based on the location, user, and other log parameters."
"The most valuable feature of Elastic Enterprise Search is user behavior analysis."
 

Cons

"There are some token limits."
"The time it takes for indexing documents could be reduced."
"We have an issue with the volume of data that we can handle."
"There are challenges with performance management and scalability."
"The pricing of this product needs to be more clear because I cannot understand it when I review the website."
"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."
"Elastic Search needs to improve authentication. It also needs to work on the Kibana visualization dashboard."
"Dashboards could be more flexible, and it would be nice to provide more drill-down capabilities."
"The GUI is the part of the program which has the most room for improvement."
"I would like to see more integration for the solution with different platforms."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing falls in the medium range."
"ELK has been considered as an alternative to Splunk to reduce licensing costs."
"The solution is affordable."
"The pricing model is questionable and needs to be addressed because when you would like to have the security they charge per machine."
"The tool is not expensive. Its licensing costs are yearly."
"The solution is free."
"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."
"This is a free, open source software (FOSS) tool, which means no cost on the front-end. There are no free lunches in this world though. Technical skill to implement and support are costly on the back-end with ELK, whether you train/hire internally or go for premium services from Elastic."
"The solution is not expensive because users have the option of choosing the managed or the subscription model."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
5%
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon Kendra?
We have good use cases where stability is everything. So it's a stable solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Kendra?
The pricing falls in the medium range. The cost depends on the size of your use case because it has a fixed cost, not a variable. The licensing is on a monthly basis. There are no extra costs. Only...
What needs improvement with Amazon Kendra?
There are some token limits. We cannot ask questions with more than 30 tokens. Access cannot be more than 200 tokens. And the token is also, like, one point. Then views are very hard limits, and it...
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?
I am not directly involved with pricing or setup costs. While I know a portion is open-source, a paid version might be necessary.
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
There should be more stability. When we started learning it, new versions came out frequently in one quarter with extended features. This can create problems for new developers because they have to...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
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 Kendra vs. Elastic Search and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.