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AWS Glue vs Elastic Search comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 3, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
5.9
Organizations find AWS Glue efficient and cost-effective despite overhead costs, though some consider alternatives due to budget constraints.
Sentiment score
5.1
Elastic Search enhances efficiency and scalability, offering significant returns through improved performance, cost savings, and early issue alerts.
I advocate using Glue in such cases.
We have not purchased any licensed products, and our use of Elastic Search is purely open-source, contributing positively to our ROI.
It is stable, and we do not encounter critical issues like server downtime, which could result in data loss.
The main benefits observed from using Elastic Search include improvements in operational efficiency, along with cost, time, and resource savings.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.5
AWS Glue customer service is praised for responsiveness and effectiveness, with mixed feedback on support speed, costs, and consistency.
Sentiment score
6.2
Elastic Search's support features strong documentation and community resources, with positive technical support, though response speed can improve.
Upgrades occur every four months, and new developments coincide with version updates.
For complex Glue-related problems such as job failures or permission issues, their documentation is good, but having direct access to support helps cut down troubleshooting time significantly.
The customer support for Elastic Search is one of the best I have ever tried.
They have always been really responsible and responsive to my requests.
I would rate technical support from Elastic Search as three out of ten.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
AWS Glue is highly scalable and serverless, praised for easy resource management, but needs better parallel computation.
Sentiment score
7.2
Elastic Search offers robust scalability and storage, but faces challenges with complex configurations, cost, and large database management.
It is beneficial to upgrade jobs, and we conduct extensive testing in development before migrating to production.
It can easily handle data from one terabyte to 100 terabytes or more, scaling nicely with larger datasets.
I would rate its scalability a ten.
Since we're on the cloud, whenever we need to upgrade or add resources, they handle everything.
We haven't encountered any problems so far, and there is the potential for auto-scaling.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
AWS Glue is stable and reliable with minor issues, scaling well, and efficient due to serverless architecture and tool integration.
Sentiment score
7.7
Elastic Search is stable and reliable, with rare issues resolved through proper resource planning and management in large data scenarios.
AWS Glue is highly stable, and I would rate its stability as nine.
The data transfer sometimes exceeded the bandwidth limits without proper notification, which caused issues.
The stability of Elasticsearch was very high.
When you put one keyword, everything related to that keyword in your ecosystem will showcase all the results.
 

Room For Improvement

AWS Glue faces challenges with startup times, interface complexity, language limitations, cost, performance, integration, and multi-cloud compatibility.
Elastic Search needs enhancements in security, scalability, user support, pricing, UI, and easier integration for beginners.
Migrating jobs from version 3.0 to 4.0 can present compatibility issues.
With AWS, I gather data from multiple sources, clean it up, normalize it, de-duplicate it, and make it presentable.
A more user-friendly and simpler process would help speed up the deployment process.
This can create problems for new developers because they have to quickly switch to another version.
It is primarily based on Unix or Linux-based operating systems and cannot be easily configured in Windows systems.
The consistency and stability of Elasticsearch are commendable, and they should keep up the good work.
 

Setup Cost

AWS Glue offers flexible, efficient serverless architecture but can be costly and unpredictable, especially for smaller organizations.
Elastic Search is open-source, but enterprise costs vary; expertise and feature needs influence overall expenses significantly.
Costing depends on resource usage, and cost optimization may involve redesigning jobs for flexibility.
AWS charges based on runtime, which can be quite pricey.
The smallest cost for a project is around €700, while the largest can reach up to €7,000 based on the scale of the usage.
We used the open-source version of Elasticsearch, which was free.
Elastic pushes clients to buy the Enterprise edition instead of the Premium edition, and we don't see the value in that other than to spend more money more quickly.
The pay-as-you-go model is advantageous for the organization, as we only pay for what we utilize.
 

Valuable Features

AWS Glue excels with its easy interface, scalable ETL processing, seamless AWS integration, affordability, and serverless architecture.
Elastic Stack is praised for its speed, scalability, integrations, analytics, flexibility, open-source nature, and excellent documentation.
For ETL, I feel the performance is excellent. If I create jobs in a standard way, the performance is great, and maintenance is also seamless.
AWS Glue's most valuable features include its transformation capabilities, which provide data quality and shape for processing in ML or AI models.
AWS Glue has reduced efforts by 60%, which is the main benefit.
Elastic Search makes handling large data volumes efficient and supports complex search operations.
The most valuable feature of Elasticsearch was the quick search capability, allowing us to search by any criteria needed.
The speed with which Elastic Search is able to search through all of the documents we place into it is quite remarkable, as we search through 65 billion documents in less than a second in most cases, on a constant consistent basis.
 

Categories and Ranking

AWS Glue
Ranking in Cloud Data Integration
1st
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
50
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Elastic Search
Ranking in Cloud Data Integration
9th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
78
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Search as a Service (1st), Vector Databases (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Cloud Data Integration category, the mindshare of AWS Glue is 14.4%, down from 21.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 2.0%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Integration Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
AWS Glue14.4%
Elastic Search2.0%
Other83.6%
Cloud Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

Saurabh Jaiswal - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables seamless integration and data preparation with robust transformation capabilities
AWS Glue's most valuable features include its transformation capabilities, which provide data quality and shape for processing in ML or AI models. It offers transformation options on canvas or through ETL pipelines, notebooks, and code. Additionally, it supports data preparation, cleaning, and filtering seamlessly. AWS Glue also enhances job scheduling and orchestration capabilities, integrating with AWS Glue Studio for comprehensive data workflow management.
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.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
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 Business11
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise32
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise38
 

Questions from the Community

How do you select the right cloud ETL tool?
AWS Glue and Azure Data factory for ELT best performance cloud services.
How does Talend Open Studio compare with AWS Glue?
We reviewed AWS Glue before choosing Talend Open Studio. AWS Glue is the managed ETL (extract, transform, and load) from Amazon Web Services. AWS Glue enables AWS users to create and manage jobs in...
What are the most common use cases for AWS Glue?
AWS Glue's main use case is for allowing users to discover, prepare, move, and integrate data from multiple sources. The product lets you use this data for analytics, application development, or ma...
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?
We could benefit from refining the machine learning models that we currently use in Elastic Search, along with the possibility to integrate agents, intelligent artificial intelligence, form of agen...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday
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 AWS Glue vs. Elastic Search and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
872,029 professionals have used our research since 2012.