Azure Cosmos DB vs. Elasticsearch

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Azure Cosmos DB
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is Microsoft's Big Data analysis platform. It is a NoSQL database service and is a replacement for the earlier DocumentDB NoSQL database.N/A
Elasticsearch
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Elasticsearch is an enterprise search tool from Elastic in Mountain View, California.
$16
per month
Pricing
Azure Cosmos DBElasticsearch
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Standard
$16.00
per month
Gold
$19.00
per month
Platinum
$22.00
per month
Enterprise
Contact Sales
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Azure Cosmos DBElasticsearch
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Features
Azure Cosmos DBElasticsearch
NoSQL Databases
Comparison of NoSQL Databases features of Product A and Product B
Azure Cosmos DB
9.9
7 Ratings
12% above category average
Elasticsearch
-
Ratings
Performance10.07 Ratings00 Ratings
Availability10.07 Ratings00 Ratings
Concurrency10.07 Ratings00 Ratings
Security10.07 Ratings00 Ratings
Scalability10.07 Ratings00 Ratings
Data model flexibility9.07 Ratings00 Ratings
Deployment model flexibility10.07 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Azure Cosmos DBElasticsearch
Small Businesses
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.3 out of 10
Algolia
Algolia
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.3 out of 10
Guru
Guru
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.3 out of 10
Guru
Guru
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Azure Cosmos DBElasticsearch
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(7 ratings)
9.0
(47 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.6
(4 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
8.8
(2 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
9.2
(2 ratings)
7.8
(9 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Azure Cosmos DBElasticsearch
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
Like any NoSQL database, whether it's MongoDB or not, it's best suited for unstructured data. It's also well suited for storing raw data before processing it and performing any type of ETL on the data.
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Elastic
Elasticsearch is a really scalable solution that can fit a lot of needs, but the bigger and/or those needs become, the more understanding & infrastructure you will need for your instance to be running correctly. Elasticsearch is not problem-free - you can get yourself in a lot of trouble if you are not following good practices and/or if are not managing the cluster correctly. Licensing is a big decision point here as Elasticsearch is a middleware component - be sure to read the licensing agreement of the version you want to try before you commit to it. Same goes for long-term support - be sure to keep yourself in the know for this aspect you may end up stuck with an unpatched version for years.
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Pros
Microsoft
  • Scalable Instantly and automatically serverless database for any large scale business.
  • Quick access and response to data queries due to high speed in reading and writing data
  • Create a powerful digital experience for your customers with real-time offers and agile access to DB with super-fast analysis and comparison for best recommendation
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Elastic
  • As I mentioned before, Elasticsearch's flexible data model is unparalleled. You can nest fields as deeply as you want, have as many fields as you want, but whatever you want in those fields (as long as it stays the same type), and all of it will be searchable and you don't need to even declare a schema beforehand!
  • Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, is super strong financially and they have a great team of devs and product managers working on Elasticsearch. When I first started using ES 3 years ago, I was 90% impressed and knew it would be a good fit. 3 years later, I am 200% impressed and blown away by how far it has come and gotten even better. If there are features that are missing or you don't think it's fast enough right now, I bet it'll be suitable next year because the team behind it is so dang fast!
  • Elasticsearch is really, really stable. It takes a lot to bring down a cluster. It's self-balancing algorithms, leader-election system, self-healing properties are state of the art. We've never seen network failures or hard-drive corruption or CPU bugs bring down an ES cluster.
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Cons
Microsoft
  • Expensive, so be careful of the use case.
  • We had a thought time migrating from traditional DBs to Cosmos. Azure should provide a seamless platform for the migration of data from on-premises to cloud.
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Elastic
  • Joining data requires duplicate de-normalized documents that make parent child relationships. It is hard and requires a lot of synchronizations
  • Tracking errors in the data in the logs can be hard, and sometimes recurring errors blow up the error logs
  • Schema changes require complete reindexing of an index
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Likelihood to Renew
Microsoft
It's efficient, easy to scale, and works. We do have to do a bit of administration, but less now than when we started with this a couple of years ago. Microsoft continues to improve its self-management capability.
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Elastic
We're pretty heavily invested in ElasticSearch at this point, and there aren't any obvious negatives that would make us reconsider this decision.
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Usability
Microsoft
It has very good compatibility and adaptability with other APIs and developers can safely create new apps because it is compatible with various tools and can be easily managed and run under the cloud, and in terms of security, it is one of the best of its kind, which is very powerful and excellent.
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Elastic
To get started with Elasticsearch, you don't have to get very involved in configuring what really is an incredibly complex system under the hood. You simply install the package, run the service, and you're immediately able to begin using it. You don't need to learn any sort of query language to add data to Elasticsearch or perform some basic searching. If you're used to any sort of RESTful API, getting started with Elasticsearch is a breeze. If you've never interacted with a RESTful API directly, the journey may be a little more bumpy. Overall, though, it's incredibly simple to use for what it's doing under the covers.
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Support Rating
Microsoft
Microsoft is the best when it comes to after-sales support. They have a well-structured training and knowledge base portal that anyone can use. They are usually quick to respond to cases and are on point for on-call support. I have no complaints from a support standpoint. Pretty happy with the support.
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Elastic
We've only used it as an opensource tooling. We did not purchase any additional support to roll out the elasticsearch software. When rolling out the application on our platform we've used the documentation which was available online. During our test phases we did not experience any bugs or issues so we did not rely on support at all.
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Implementation Rating
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Elastic
Do not mix data and master roles. Dedicate at least 3 nodes just for Master
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Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
Cosmos DB is unique in the industry as a true multi-model, cloud-native database engine that comes with solutions for geo-redundancy, multi-master writes, (globally!) low latency, and cost-effective hosting built in. I've yet to see anything else that even comes close to the power that Cosmos DB packs into its solution. The simplicity and tooling support are nice bonus features as well.
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Elastic
As far as we are concerned, Elasticsearch is the gold standard and we have barely evaluated any alternatives. You could consider it an alternative to a relational or NoSQL database, so in cases where those suffice, you don't need Elasticsearch. But if you want powerful text-based search capabilities across large data sets, Elasticsearch is the way to go.
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Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • It's made managing raw data much easier
  • It provides a way to maintain raw data at a low cost
  • It's easy to massage the data
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Elastic
  • We have had great luck with implementing Elasticsearch for our search and analytics use cases.
  • While the operational burden is not minimal, operating a cluster of servers, using a custom query language, writing Elasticsearch-specific bulk insert code, the performance and the relative operational ease of Elasticsearch are unparalleled.
  • We've easily saved hundreds of thousands of dollars implementing Elasticsearch vs. RDBMS vs. other no-SQL solutions for our specific set of problems.
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