Azure AI Search vs. Elastic Enterprise Search

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Azure Cognitive Search
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Azure AI Search (formerly Azure Cognitive Search) is enterprise search as a service, from Microsoft.
$0.10
Per Hour
Elastic Enterprise Search
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
Elastic Enterprise Search Swiftype is a platform with modules for Site Search, App Search and Workplace Search, that boasts powering search for thousands of enterprises and websites. The services were developed by Swiftype and acquired by Elastic in late 2017. Powered by Elasticsearch, the vendor states Elastic Enterprise Search is fast, with proven, optimized relevance models designed for real-life, natural search.
$79
per month
Pricing
Azure AI SearchElastic Enterprise Search
Editions & Modules
Basic
$0.101
Per Hour
Standard S1
$0.336
Per Hour
Standard S2
$1.344
Per Hour
Standard S3
$2.688
Per Hour
Standard
$79
per month
Pro
$199
per month
Premium
Custom
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Azure Cognitive SearchElastic Enterprise Search
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Azure AI SearchElastic Enterprise Search
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Azure AI SearchElastic Enterprise Search
Small Businesses
Algolia
Algolia
Score 8.8 out of 10
Algolia
Algolia
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Guru
Guru
Score 9.0 out of 10
Guru
Guru
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Guru
Guru
Score 9.0 out of 10
Guru
Guru
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Azure AI SearchElastic Enterprise Search
Likelihood to Recommend
8.2
(2 ratings)
8.1
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
Azure AI SearchElastic Enterprise Search
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
Incredibly robust software for an enterprise organization to plug into their application. If you have a full development resource team at your disposal, this is great software and I highly recommend it. Largely, however, you won't be able to use this prior to the enterprise level. It's just too complicated and cumbersome of a product.
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Elastic
Swiftype is excellent for e-commerce companies and especially the financial services sector where speed plays a major role in executing transactions. It is also very dynamic and customizable. It is very useful for electronics/travel reservations on e-commerce sites also. The only place it is inappropriate is when it comes to indexing a website in which case Google is slightly better, as I mentioned before. There is nothing much to complain about here in regards to the breadth of applications and analytics it offers.
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Pros
Microsoft
  • Azure Search provides a fully-managed service for loading, indexing, and querying content.
  • Azure Search has an easy C# SDK that allows you to implement loading and retrieving data from the service very easy. Any developer with some Microsoft experience should feel immediate familiarity.
  • Azure Search has a robust set of abilities around slicing and presenting the data during a search, such as narrowing by geospatial data and providing an auto-complete capabilities via "Suggesters".
  • Azure Search has one-of-a-kind "Cognitive Search" capabilities that enable running AI algorithms over data to enrich it before it is stored into the service. For example, one could automatically do a sentiment analysis when ingesting the data and store that as one of the searchable fields on the content.
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Elastic
  • It's very easy to implement. The documentation is great and you can be up and running very quickly.
  • It's easy to configure. The web-based user interface makes it super simple to configure (i.e. customize search rankings, edit synonyms, etc.).
  • Their support is very friendly and helpful. Whenever I had a question or couldn't figure something old, they were quick to help me out.
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Cons
Microsoft
  • It's an enterprise level product so you need to have the budget for it.
  • Challenging-to-impossible for a non-technical administrator to implement.
  • It further locks you into Microsoft's ecosystem and doesn't play well with non-Microsoft software. Depending on your point of view, this can be a pro or a con.
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Elastic
  • Swiftype does not have indexes ready to go. When you add a new website to the search set, it takes some time to index the website. This is something that is different from what Google does. Google in this particular aspect does a relatively better job.
  • Swiftype is very expensive, this makes it difficult for smaller companies to afford.
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Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
As I've mentioned, the biggest competitor to Azure Search is actually Azure SQL Database. It doesn't have as many features, but it's more economical and most .Net applications will have one already. As long as you can arrive at a schema and ranking strategy, it's a "good enough" solution. There are a variety of search technologies (Lucene, Solr, Elasticsearch) that implement a search service. Some of them are even open source, though I would only say "free" if you do not value your time. They most likely need to be hosted via Container (or VM if you're old school), so you're incurring DevOps costs to not only set them up but monitor and maintain them yourself.
If you're already on AWS, there is almost no reason to use Azure Search. Unless you're already multi-cloud, desperately need the cognitive abilities, and don't mind a potential performance hit from looking across datacenters (hey, it could happen), you should probably just use Amazon CloudSearch.
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Elastic
Google Search Appliance is no longer supported. Apache Solr is a popular, free open source solution, but it lacks a web crawler and is more difficult to configure and maintain.
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Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • Our internal market research illustrates that users are finding their desired information faster on account of autosuggest.
  • Time spent on checkout page (for conversions) is significantly decreased.
  • Clicks required on checkout page (for conversions) is significantly decreased.
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Elastic
  • It has a positive impact as it helps traders and other users to seamlessly use applications.
  • It has a positive ROI and we would know the results in time to come.
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ScreenShots