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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
7th
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
6.8
Number of Reviews
67
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 Azure Search is 15.4%, up from 12.5% 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

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

"The search functionality time has been reduced to a few milliseconds."
"Azure Search is well-documented, making it easy to understand and implement."
"The customer engagement was good."
"The product is pretty resilient."
"The solution's initial setup is straightforward."
"Because all communication is done via the REST API, data is retrieved quickly in JSON format to reduce overhead and latency.​"
"The product is extremely configurable, allowing you to customize the search experience to suit your needs."
"It provides good access capabilities to various platforms."
"It helps us to analyse the logs based on the location, user, and other log parameters."
"Implementing the main requirements regarding my support portal​."
"The search speed is most valuable and important."
"The solution is quite scalable and this is one of its advantages."
"The solution has good security features. I have been happy with the dashboards and interface."
"I find the solution to be fast."
"The most valuable feature of Elastic Enterprise Search is the opportunity to search behind and between different logs."
"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."
 

Cons

"Adding items to Azure Search using its .NET APIs sometimes throws exceptions."
"The initial setup is not as easy as it should be."
"They should add an API for third-party vendors, like a security operating center or reporting system, that would be a big improvement."
"For SDKs, Azure Search currently offers solutions for .NET and Python. Additional platforms would be welcomed, especially native iOS and Android solutions for mobile development."
"The after-hour services are slow."
"For availability, expanding its use to all Azure datacenters would be helpful in increasing awareness and usage of the product.​"
"It would be good if the site found a better way to filter things based on subscription."
"The pricing is room for improvement."
"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."
"The pricing of this product needs to be more clear because I cannot understand it when I review the website."
"New Relic could be more flexible, similar to Elasticsearch."
"There should be more stability."
"The solution has quite a steep learning curve. The usability and general user-friendliness could be improved. However, that is kind of typical with products that have a lot of flexibility, or a lot of capabilities. Sometimes having more choices makes things more complex. It makes it difficult to configure it, though. It's kind of a bitter pill that you have to swallow in the beginning and you really have to get through it."
"Enterprise scaling of what have been essentially separate, free open source software (FOSS) products has been a challenge, but the folks at Elastic have published new add-ons (X-Pack and ECE) to help large companies grow ELK to required scales."
"There is a maximum of 10,000 entries, so the limitation means that if I wanted to analyze certain IP addresses more than 10,000 times, I wouldn't be able to dump or print that information."
"Elastic Enterprise Search could improve the report templates."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost is comparable."
"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, where one is the low price, and ten is the high price."
"​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.​"
"The solution is affordable."
"I think the solution's pricing is ok compared to other cloud devices."
"The pricing structure depends on the scalability steps."
"Although the ELK Elasticsearch software is open-source, we buy the hardware."
"I rate Elastic Search's pricing an eight out of ten."
"The price of Elasticsearch is fair. It is a more expensive solution, like QRadar. The price for Elasticsearch is not much more than other solutions we have."
"The price could be better."
"​The pricing and license model are clear: node-based model."
"The solution is not expensive because users have the option of choosing the managed or the subscription model."
"It can be expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
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 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

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: January 2025.
831,997 professionals have used our research since 2012.