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Elastic Search pros and cons

Vendor: Elastic

4.1 out of 5

83 reviews
97% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

Elastic Search aggregates log and machine data into a searchable index, reducing identification time for application issues. It allows scalability by adding machines to enhance performance, although it faces challenges with enterprise scaling. It offers powerful full-text search and machine learning features but suffers from unclear licensing and poor support. Users report insufficient documentation, affecting integration ease, while performance management needs improvement. Elastic Search enhances visibility but struggles with backward compatibility issues.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Elastic Search significantly reduces the time needed to identify and isolate application issues through its ability to aggregate log and machine data into a searchable index.

It offers strong scalability, allowing users to add machines to enhance performance without issues, making it flexible and easy to accommodate additional data.

Users benefit from the powerful full-text search capabilities, enabling fast and efficient handling of large data volumes.

Its machine learning features, including multilingual models and ease of integration, enhance the customization and efficiency of search projects.

Elastic Search provides invaluable insights into system components and entities, helping businesses maintain high visibility and effectively manage use cases.

CONS

Elastic Search struggles with enterprise scaling and lacks backward compatibility, causing issues with feature removals.

Technical support from Elastic Search is rated poorly and does not adequately address user needs.

Documentation and guides for Elastic Search are insufficient, making it challenging for users unfamiliar with the platform.

Elastic Search's licensing model, subscription requirements, and pricing structure are criticized for lacking clarity.

There are concerns about Elastic Search's scalability and performance management, which need improvement.

Elastic Search Pros review quotes

RH

Program Manager - Enterprise Command Center at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Jan 8, 2018

The ability to aggregate log and machine data into a searchable index reduces time to identify and isolate issues for an application. Saves time in triage and incident response by eliminating manual steps to access and parse logs on separate systems, within large infrastructure footprints.

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EChannel IT Architect at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jan 8, 2018

It is easy to scale with the cluster node model.

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PP

Prabhanshu Pandit

Programmer at a tech services company

Jan 21, 2018

Helps us to store the data in key value pairs and, based on that, we can produce visualisations in Kibana.

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DevOps/System Administrator at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jan 31, 2018

Gives us a more user-friendly, centralized solution (for those who just needed a quick glance, without being masters of sed and awk) as well as the ability to implement various mechanisms for machine-learning from our logs, and sending alerts for anomalies.

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System Analyst at S7

Apr 3, 2019

We had many reasons to implement Elasticsearch for search term solutions. Elasticsearch products provide enterprise landscape support for different areas of the company.

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AP

Alfredo Pérsico Gutiérrez

Works at Sincrobox SAC

Apr 19, 2019

The most valuable feature for us is the analytics that we can configure and view using Kibana.

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Murex Consultant at a tech services company

Aug 26, 2019

The special text processing features in this solution are very important for me.

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BT

Bogdan Tsegelnik

Engineer at IT Specialist LLC

Sep 19, 2019

The most valuable features are the data store and the X-pack extension.

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Data Scientist at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

Dec 9, 2019

I value the feature that allows me to share the dashboards to different people with different levels of access.

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Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Dec 15, 2019

The product is scalable with good performance.

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Elastic Search Cons review quotes

RH

Program Manager - Enterprise Command Center at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Jan 8, 2018

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.

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EChannel IT Architect at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jan 8, 2018

Machine learning on search needs improvement.

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PP

Prabhanshu Pandit

Programmer at a tech services company

Jan 21, 2018

It needs email notification, similar to what Logentries has. Because of the notification issue, we moved to Logentries, as it provides a simple way to receive notification whenever a server encounters an error or unexpected conditions (which we have defined using RegEx).

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Free Report: Elastic Search Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Elastic Search. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.

879,455 professionals have used our research since 2012.

DevOps/System Administrator at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jan 31, 2018

Elasticsearch could improve by honoring Unix environmental variables and not relying only on those provided by Java (e.g. installing plugins over the Unix http proxy).

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System Analyst at S7

Apr 3, 2019

We see the need for some improvements with Elasticsearch. We would like the Elasticsearch package to include training lessons for our staff.

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AP

Alfredo Pérsico Gutiérrez

Works at Sincrobox SAC

Apr 19, 2019

This product could be improved with additional security, and the addition of support for machine learning devices.

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Murex Consultant at a tech services company

Aug 26, 2019

Better dashboards or a better configuration system would be very good.

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BT

Bogdan Tsegelnik

Engineer at IT Specialist LLC

Sep 19, 2019

The pricing of this product needs to be more clear because I cannot understand it when I review the website.

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Data Scientist at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

Dec 9, 2019

Ratio aggregation is not supported in this solution.

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Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Dec 15, 2019

The GUI is the part of the program which has the most room for improvement.

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