Elasticsearch vs. IBM Watson Content Analytics

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.

Incentivized

IBM Content Analytics is well suited for organizations with the resources to invest a significant amount of energy in an advanced analytics engine. The software improved the productivity of analysts and programmers. The software is not suitable for companies that just want Excel-type analyses or that lack the capabilities of doing advanced analytics.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Impressive and efficient indexing system.
• Rarely does the indexing have issues that need to rebuild/reindex.
• Searches are almost instantaneous and end users can move on to the next task.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• It would be better if its available for cross platforms.
• Pricing could be adjusted better.
• More number of third party add-ons required.

Incentivized

We're pretty heavily invested in ElasticSearch at this point, and there aren't any obvious negatives that would make us reconsider this decision.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Do not mix data and master roles. Dedicate at least 3 nodes just for Master

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Perhaps the biggest advantage of IBM Watson Content Analytics is the IBM feel. I think IBM puts lots of resources into developing products that even sociologists can use. It's so easy, that to professionals wanting customized analysis, it might be kind of offensive. The drawback is that Content Analytics is not as fast as its competitors.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Organized, easy to produce search results.
• Never lose a document again.

Incentivized