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Azure Search 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

Azure Search
Ranking in Search as a Service
5th
Average Rating
7.4
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Elastic Search
Ranking in Search as a Service
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
67
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (9th), Vector Databases (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Azure Search is 14.6%, up from 13.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 14.4%, up from 8.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

Sandeep Srirangam - PeerSpot reviewer
Customer engagement & documentation about APIs are great, but it would be good if the UI is a bit more intuitive for search experience
I use the solution mainly to search the logs and to search for VMs by their names or subscription names. I wouldn't rate it great since the logs are a bit complicated The solution was really pretty good. The customer engagement was good. The presented documentation or exposure to the APIs to get…
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

"Creates indexers to get data from different data sources."
"Offers a tremendous amount of flexibility and scalability when integrating with applications."
"Azure Search is well-documented, making it easy to understand and implement."
"The product is pretty resilient."
"It provides good access capabilities to various platforms."
"The search functionality time has been reduced to a few milliseconds."
"The product is extremely configurable, allowing you to customize the search experience to suit your needs."
"The customer engagement was good."
"Implementing the main requirements regarding my support portal​."
"I really like the visualization that you can do within it. That's really handy. Product-wise, it is a very good and stable product."
"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."
"The search speed is most valuable and important."
"The most valuable feature is the out of the box Kibana."
"All the quality features are there. There are about 60 to 70 reports available."
"The initial setup is fairly simple."
"The flexibility and the support for diverse languages that it provides for searching the database are most valuable. We can use different languages to query the database."
 

Cons

"The pricing is room for improvement."
"They should add an API for third-party vendors, like a security operating center or reporting system, that would be a big improvement."
"For availability, expanding its use to all Azure datacenters would be helpful in increasing awareness and usage of the product.​"
"Adding items to Azure Search using its .NET APIs sometimes throws exceptions."
"The initial setup is not as easy as it should be."
"The solution's stability could be better."
"The after-hour services are slow."
"It would be good if the site found a better way to filter things based on subscription."
"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."
"An improvement would be to have an interface that allows easier navigation and tracing of logs."
"Technical support should be faster."
"Elastic Enterprise Search could improve the report templates."
"Machine learning on search needs improvement."
"It was not possible to use authentication three years back. You needed to buy the product's services for authentication."
"The GUI is the part of the program which has the most room for improvement."
"Performance improvement could come from skipping background refresh on search idle shards (which is already being addressed in the upcoming seventh version)."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"​When telling people about the product, I always encourage them to set up a new service using the free pricing tier. This allows them to learn about the product and its capabilities in a risk-free environment. Depending on their needs, the free tier may be suitable for their projects, however enterprise applications will most likely required a higher, paid tier."
"For the actual costs, I encourage users to view the pricing page on the Azure site for details.​"
"I think the solution's pricing is ok compared to other cloud devices."
"The cost is comparable."
"The solution is affordable."
"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, where one is the low price, and ten is the high price."
"To access all the features available you require both the open source license and the production license."
"I rate Elastic Search's pricing an eight out of ten."
"The tool is an open-source product."
"The solution is free."
"We are using the Community Edition because Elasticsearch's licensing model is not flexible or suitable for us. They ask for an annual subscription. We also got the development consultancy from Elasticsearch for 60 days or something like that, but they were just trying to do the same trick. That's why we didn't purchase it. We are just using the Community Edition."
"We are using the open-sourced version."
"The solution is affordable."
"We use the free version for some logs, but not extensive use."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
24%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Azure Search?
The after-hour services are slow. It could be better.
What is your primary use case for Azure Search?
We use the solution to link the Active Directory account to Office 365.
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 don't know about pricing. That is dealt with by the sales team and our account team. I was not involved with that.
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
I found an issue with Elasticsearch in terms of aggregation. They are good, yet the rules written for this are not really good. There is a maximum of 10,000 entries, so the limitation means that if...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

XOMNI, Real Madrid C.F., Weichert Realtors, JLL, NAV CANADA, Medihoo, autoTrader Corporation, Gjirafa
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 Azure Search vs. Elastic Search and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
844,944 professionals have used our research since 2012.