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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

"Azure Search is well-documented, making it easy to understand and implement."
"The product is pretty resilient."
"The customer engagement was good."
"Creates indexers to get data from different data sources."
"The search functionality time has been reduced to a few milliseconds."
"It provides good access capabilities to various platforms."
"Offers a tremendous amount of flexibility and scalability when integrating with applications."
"The solution's initial setup is straightforward."
"It is stable."
"Elastic Search makes handling large data volumes efficient and supports complex search operations."
"We had many reasons to implement Elasticsearch for search term solutions. Elasticsearch products provide enterprise landscape support for different areas of the company."
"The most valuable feature for us is the analytics that we can configure and view using Kibana."
"It provides deep visibility into your cloud and distributed applications, from microservices to serverless architectures. It quickly identifies and resolves the root causes of issues, like gaining visibility into all the cloud-based and on-prem applications."
"You have dashboards, it is visual, there are maps, you can create canvases. It's more visual than anything that I've ever used."
"Elastic Enterprise Search is scalable. On a scale of one to 10, with one being not scalable and 10 being very scalable, I give Elastic Enterprise Search a 10."
"Using real-time search functionality to support operational decisions has been helpful."
 

Cons

"It would be good if the site found a better way to filter things based on subscription."
"Adding items to Azure Search using its .NET APIs sometimes throws exceptions."
"The after-hour services are slow."
"The solution's stability could be better."
"The pricing is room for improvement."
"The initial setup is not as easy as it should be."
"For availability, expanding its use to all Azure datacenters would be helpful in increasing awareness and usage of the product.​"
"They should add an API for third-party vendors, like a security operating center or reporting system, that would be a big improvement."
"There should be more stability."
"It was not possible to use authentication three years back. You needed to buy the product's services for authentication."
"There is a lack of technical people to develop, implement and optimize equipment operation and web queries."
"I found an issue with Elasticsearch in terms of aggregation. They are good, yet the rules written for this are not really good."
"I would rate the stability a seven out of ten. We faced a few issues."
"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."
"Elastic Enterprise Search can improve by adding some kind of search that can be used out of the box without too much struggle with configuration. With every kind of search engine, there is some kind of special function that you need to do. A simple out-of-the-box search would be useful."
"Machine learning on search needs improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, where one is the low price, and ten is the high price."
"I think the solution's pricing is ok compared to other cloud devices."
"The cost is comparable."
"The solution is affordable."
"For the actual costs, I encourage users to view the pricing page on the Azure site for details.​"
"​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."
"We are using the free version and intend to upgrade."
"ELK has been considered as an alternative to Splunk to reduce licensing costs."
"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."
"I rate Elastic Search's pricing an eight out of ten."
"we are using a licensed version of the product."
"We use the free version for some logs, but not extensive use."
"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."
"We are paying $1,500 a month to use the solution. If you want to have endpoint protection you need to pay more."
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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: April 2025.
848,576 professionals have used our research since 2012.