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Azure Cognitive Search VS ElasticSearch

Compare Azure Cognitive Search VS ElasticSearch and see what are their differences

Azure Cognitive Search logo Azure Cognitive Search

Azure Search makes it easy to add powerful and sophisticated search capabilities to your website or...

ElasticSearch logo ElasticSearch

Elasticsearch is an open source, distributed, RESTful search engine.
  • Azure Cognitive Search Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-01-27
  • ElasticSearch Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-10

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.

ElasticSearch features and specs

  • Scalability
    ElasticSearch is highly scalable, allowing you to handle large volumes of data and distribute indexing and search tasks across multiple nodes.
  • Real-Time Data
    It provides real-time indexing and searching capabilities, making it suitable for applications that require up-to-the-minute data retrieval and analysis.
  • Full-Text Search
    ElasticSearch is well-known for its powerful full-text search capabilities, enabling complex search queries and supporting a wide range of search options.
  • Complex Query Support
    It offers a rich query language allowing for complex and nested searching with filters, aggregations, and more.
  • Distributed Architecture
    ElasticSearch is designed to be distributed by nature, making it resilient to node failures and allowing data and search requests to be distributed across a cluster.
  • Open Source
    ElasticSearch is open-source, offering flexibility and a large community of developers that contribute to its continuous improvement and support.
  • Analytics
    Besides search, it also supports powerful analytics and visualization tools, especially when integrated with Kibana, its visualization dashboard.
  • Integrations
    ElasticSearch can easily integrate with various data sources and frameworks, enhancing its usability across different applications.

Possible disadvantages of ElasticSearch

  • Complexity
    Operating ElasticSearch can be complex, particularly when dealing with large-scale deployments, requiring specialized knowledge and expertise.
  • Resource Intensive
    ElasticSearch can be resource-intensive, requiring significant amounts of RAM and CPU, which can be costly for large-scale operations.
  • Consistency
    As a distributed system, ElasticSearch can sometimes face consistency issues, especially in scenarios involving partitions or network failures.
  • Security
    Though security features are available, they often require additional configurations and are more robust in the paid versions, which can be a concern for open-source users.
  • Cost
    While the core ElasticSearch software is open-source, scaling and additional features (like security, monitoring, and machine learning) are part of the paid Elastic Stack offerings.
  • Learning Curve
    There is a steep learning curve associated with mastering ElasticSearch and its query DSL (Domain Specific Language), which can be a barrier for new users.
  • Maintenance
    Properly maintaining an ElasticSearch cluster requires ongoing management, monitoring, and tuning to ensure optimal performance.
  • Backup and Restore
    Managing backups and restores can be cumbersome and is not as straightforward as in some other databases or data storage solutions.

Azure Cognitive Search videos

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

ElasticSearch videos

What is Elasticsearch?

More videos:

  • Review - Real world Elasticsearch Compose/Stack File Review
  • Demo - Elastic Search

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Azure Cognitive Search and ElasticSearch)
Custom Search Engine
10 10%
90% 90
Custom Search
10 10%
90% 90
Search API
14 14%
86% 86
Search Engine
8 8%
92% 92

User comments

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Reviews

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

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.

ElasticSearch Reviews

Log analysis: Elasticsearch vs Apache Doris
Benchmark tests with ES Rally, the official testing tool for Elasticsearch, showed that Apache Doris was around 5 times as fast as Elasticsearch in data writing, 2.3 times as fast in queries, and it consumed only 1/5 of the storage space that Elasticsearch used. On the test dataset of HTTP logs, it achieved a writing speed of 550 MB/s and a compression ratio of 10:1.
4 Leading Enterprise Search Software to Look For in 2022
“ We’ve built some big data search and mobile desktop applications that help our customers experience fast natural language search. Some applications require this, where I need to find data, I don’t want to build some complex query, I just need to ask the system “help me search for this information, narrow my results” and I don't want to wait several seconds. We’ve built a...
Top 10 Site Search Software Tools & Plugins for 2022
Elasticsearch is built for human users, which means that it’s equipped to handle mistakes that humans often make such as typos. This helps to improve search relevance and enhance the overall search experience. It offers real-time crawling, which automatically detects changes in content and ensures that search results are fresh and relevant.
Best Elasticsearch alternatives for search
However, when it comes to dealing with synonyms (i.e. ‘smart phone’ for ‘Samsung Galaxy’), slang (i.e. ‘kicks’ for ‘Nike Air Jordans’) and context (i.e. ‘car park’ is different to ‘dog park’) – you have to set up a bunch of manual rules/definitions with Elasticsearch and co.
Source: relevance.ai
5 Open-Source Search Engines For your Website
Elasticsearch provides key features like Advanced Full-Text Search Capabilities like Data indexing, Search capabilities including phrases, wildcards, auto suggestions, filters & facets, etc... Elasticsearch can also be used for other use-cases like
Source: vishnuch.tech

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, ElasticSearch should be more popular than Azure Cognitive Search. It has been mentiond 17 times since March 2021. 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.

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 / over 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

ElasticSearch mentions (17)

  • ElasticSearch from the Azure store or from Elastic.co?
    What surprised me is that on the Azure store, the only option I see is (Pay as you go), whereas on elastic.co there are the standard platinum and enterprise tiers followed by a where to deploy page and a pricing overview. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Hunspell on elastic.co cloud
    Can anyone help me how to upload custom hunspell stemmer files to elastic cloud (elastic.co)? According to elastic docs it should go under elasticsearch/config/hunspell, but according to cloud docs I should upload it via features/extension tab. So I tried zipping the hunspell folder and uploading it. I also figured out that it should be in the dictionaries folder, but after uploading it still doesn't work. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Creating a modern, SaaS website.. what am I missing?
    I can't figure out where I have to go to get more or less of a custom, premium website. I should mention that I look up to websites like elastic.co for example, would be very happy with something like that. I could really use some guidance! Source: about 2 years ago
  • Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2022)
    Elastic | Multiple software engineering roles | REMOTE (EMEA) | Full-time | https://elastic.co Elastic offers solutions for security and observability that are built on a single, open technology stack that can be deployed anywhere. Elastic Security enables security teams to prevent, detect, and respond to attacks with a solution built atop the speed and reliable of the Elastic stack. The Security External... - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • Seeking clarification about which part of ElasticSearch to use for our website
    I have been trying to digest the elastic.co website to try to understand how we can use elastic search, but I've come to a point where I'm not sure which part of elastic, (if any) makes sense for us. In fact I am royally confused. I wonder if anyone here can help clarify? Source: almost 3 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Azure Cognitive Search and ElasticSearch, 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.

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

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.

Typesense - Typo tolerant, delightfully simple, open source search 🔍

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.