Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Amazon CloudSearch VS Azure Cognitive Search

Compare Amazon CloudSearch VS Azure Cognitive Search and see what are their differences

Amazon CloudSearch logo Amazon CloudSearch

Amazon CloudSearch is a fully-managed service in the cloud that makes it easy to set up, manage, and scale a search solution for your website.

Azure Cognitive Search logo Azure Cognitive Search

Azure Search makes it easy to add powerful and sophisticated search capabilities to your website or...
  • Amazon CloudSearch Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-12
  • Azure Cognitive Search Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-01-27

Amazon CloudSearch features and specs

  • Easy Setup
    Amazon CloudSearch is designed to be easy to set up and manage. You can quickly configure a search domain, upload data, and begin searching, reducing the time to market for your applications.
  • Scalability
    The service automatically scales resources up and down based on the volume of data and the rate of traffic, ensuring your search application can handle varying loads without manual intervention.
  • Fully Managed
    As a fully managed service, Amazon CloudSearch handles all the heavy lifting associated with maintaining and scaling servers, performing software patches, and monitoring health metrics.
  • Search Features
    Amazon CloudSearch supports multiple search features out-of-the-box, including faceting, highlighting, and autocomplete, providing a rich search experience without requiring custom implementations.
  • Integration with AWS Ecosystem
    It seamlessly integrates with other AWS services like S3, DynamoDB, and Kinesis, making it straightforward to ingest and process data from various sources within your AWS environment.

Possible disadvantages of Amazon CloudSearch

  • Limited Customization
    Compared to other search solutions like Elasticsearch, Amazon CloudSearch offers fewer customization options and advanced features, which might be restrictive for complex search requirements.
  • Cost
    Although pricing can be competitive, the cost can quickly escalate with large datasets and high query volumes, and it may not be as cost-effective as other solutions depending on your usage patterns.
  • Less Community Support
    Amazon CloudSearch has a smaller community and fewer third-party plugins compared to more popular search engines like Elasticsearch, making it harder to find quick solutions and best practices through community support.
  • Performance
    In some scenarios, users have reported that Amazon CloudSearch can be slower in performance compared to other search engines, particularly for complex queries or large datasets.
  • Limited Offline Capabilities
    Because it's a managed service, there's limited control over offline access or local development environments. This can be a hindrance if you need to debug or test changes without affecting the live environment.

Azure Cognitive Search features and specs

  • Scalability
    Azure Cognitive Search can handle large amounts of data and queries, making it suitable for both small and enterprise-level applications.
  • AI-Driven Capabilities
    It incorporates AI-powered features like natural language processing, image recognition, and text analysis to improve search relevance and provide richer search experiences.
  • Integrated Security
    Provides built-in security features such as encryption and identity management, ensuring that your search data is secure.
  • Easy Integration
    Easily integrates with other Azure services and third-party applications, enhancing its utility in a multi-service environment.
  • Customizable Ranking
    Offers features to customize search result rankings and tailor the search experience to specific business needs.

Possible disadvantages of Azure Cognitive Search

  • Complex Pricing Model
    The pricing structure can be complex and may require careful planning to manage costs effectively.
  • Learning Curve
    It might have a steep learning curve for developers unfamiliar with Azure services or cloud-based search solutions.
  • Limited Advanced Search Features
    While powerful, some users may find it lacks certain advanced search features found in specialized search platforms.
  • Dependency on Internet Connectivity
    As a cloud service, it depends on internet connectivity, which might not be ideal for applications requiring offline capabilities.

Amazon CloudSearch videos

Getting Started with Amazon CloudSearch

More videos:

  • Review - Getting Started with Amazon CloudSearch: Product Tour Screencast

Azure Cognitive Search videos

Azure Search Tutorial - Azure Cognitive Search | AZ-203 | AZ-204

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Amazon CloudSearch and Azure Cognitive Search)
Custom Search Engine
57 57%
43% 43
Custom Search
57 57%
43% 43
Search API
56 56%
44% 44
Search Engine
51 51%
49% 49

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Amazon CloudSearch and Azure Cognitive Search

Amazon CloudSearch Reviews

Top 10 Site Search Software Tools & Plugins for 2022
Amazon CloudSearch comes with all the popular search features such as auto-complete, intelligent text processing, custom indexing, and geospatial search. It also supports 34 languages, which makes it an excellent solution for businesses that cater to an international audience or intend to expand globally.
Make Your WordPress Search Powerful with Algolia and 9 others
AWS CloudSearch is scalable and known for its high performance. Pricing is based on the usage and pays as you go.
Source: geekflare.com

Azure Cognitive Search Reviews

4 Leading Enterprise Search Software to Look For in 2022
It should be mentioned that the Azure cognitive search pricing is fully flexible to the needs of your enterprise. For example, you can decide whether to get more performance by gaining more queries per second or a higher document count each time you use the search. These alterations influence the costs that makes final pricing fully individual based on your needs.

Social recommendations and mentions

Azure Cognitive Search might be a bit more popular than Amazon CloudSearch. We know about 4 links to it since March 2021 and only 4 links to Amazon CloudSearch. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Amazon CloudSearch mentions (4)

  • How does a large application's search functionality work? ELI5
    Personally, rather than trying to implement this functionality myself from scratch I would use something like Amazon CloudSearch that supports autocomplete suggestions for things that have been added to it. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • How Should I Build a Search Bar
    TL;DR: Dynamo is "bad" for searching. Use something else ( Elastic, CloudSearch ) if you don't know what you're doing. Source: about 3 years ago
  • Ask HN: Why is search on Amazon so bad?
    Maybe they use:
      https://aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch/
    . - Source: Hacker News / over 3 years ago
  • Options for serverless search?
    There is also Amazon CloudSearch as a managed search service but it does seem kind of abandoned from the looks of its landing page. Source: over 3 years ago

Azure Cognitive Search mentions (4)

  • Make your Azure OpenAI apps compliant with RBAC
    Microsoft offers an array of different AI-powered products, including Azure OpenAI Service, Azure AI Search, Azure AI Speech, and their most recent Microsoft Copilot for Office 365. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Show HN: Dera – A platform to manage chunks and embeddings for building RAG apps
    Very cool. I wonder when it makes sense to engineer things at this level vs using something like Azure AI search. [0] Love to see version control on all the things! Wonder if the version control features would be more robust if implemented in Doltgres. [0] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/ai-services/ai-search/ [1] https://github.com/dolthub/doltgresql. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • 🎵 Do you want to build a Chatbot? 🎵
    Azure Cognitive Search may seem out of place in an article on conversational AI, but I do believe that chatbots are really often a form of conversational search. You're interacting with a virtual agent looking for some piece of information or looking to accomplish some task. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Managing the infrastructure of a reusable ecommerce platform with Terraform
    In the ones where we need a persistence layer, we rely on the resources Azure Cosmos DB or Azure Database for PostgreSQL. Other services provide an API to search among a catalog of products with Azure Cognitive Search. As I will explain later, we work with different environments, therefore, creating and updating the resources across them becomes a harder task. - Source: dev.to / almost 4 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Amazon CloudSearch and Azure Cognitive Search, you can also consider the following products

Algolia - Algolia's Search API makes it easy to deliver a great search experience in your apps & websites. Algolia Search provides hosted full-text, numerical, faceted and geolocalized search.

ElasticSearch - Elasticsearch is an open source, distributed, RESTful search engine.

Swiftype - The simplest way to add search to your website or application. Sign up for free.

Apache Solr - Solr is an open source enterprise search server based on Lucene search library, with XML/HTTP and...

Google Cloud Search - Search across all your company's content in G Suite.

Site Search 360 - Site Search 360 enhances and improves your built-in CMS or product search with autocompletion, semantic search, filters, facets, detailed analytics, and a whole lot of customization options.