# Elasticsearch 68 Hacker News commenters recommended Elasticsearch and 75 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months. **Verdict:** Fast full-text search and aggregations with flexible queries, popular for logs and search; caveat: overkill for small uses and poor as a primary database. ## Why people recommend it - Fast, flexible search and aggregations (4 comments): "Elasticsearch offers a ton of aggregates out of the box for "free" completely configurable by query string." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46906224)) "ElasticSearch is amazing but is really optimized for full text search and aggregations" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49667560)) "throwing documents into elastic search is really easy and the search is really good" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47297324)) - Strong for logs (3 comments): "Anyone with any sort of scale where you actually need indexing immediately drops journald and uses loki or elasticsearch instead." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49293041)) "I have yet to come across anything that performs better and is more flexible for logs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46656407)) "We’re using Greylog+Elastic Search which would totally replace a Loki-only stack." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45935072)) - Simple to run at small scale (4 comments): "Elasticsearch is pretty simple to operate unless you have a huge cluster with nodes operating in different modes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46631295)) "ElasitcSearch is fine. If your dataset isn't too big you aren't going to hit shard and memory limits" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48584853)) "Running a small ES with dual save alongside your relational store is trivial." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49383588)) - Mature, well-understood, easy to maintain (2 comments): "Elastic is mature tech everyone understands so it's easy to maintain" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47635650)) "elastic gives you so many lessons learned and tunes ootb that it sings" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48987335)) ## What people warn about - Poor as a primary data store (4 comments): "It was mostly juniors that reached for it for transaction processing, and I had to disabuse them of the notion that it was fit for purpose there." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649906)) "data integrity is not a top tier priority for search engine developers because a search engine is assumed not to be the primary data store" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46651878)) "I've seen some examples of people using ES as a database, which I'd advise against for pretty much the reasons TFA brings up" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46651237)) - Operational complexity and cost (3 comments): "The operational complexity of running Elasticsearch or a separate vector store alongside Postgres rarely justifies itself" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47254784)) "For most of the application out there elastic (or kafka or any other specialized tool) is just too much(and too costly)." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49364133)) "Installing & maintaining a Postgres extension is vastly, vastly simpler than running Elasticsearch and Kafka" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49363340)) - Company and licensing controversies (4 comments): "Elasticsearch was specifically mentioned as a partner of the "Gaza Humanitarian Foundation", a fake aid org who caused many Palestinians to be killed under their watch." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45957277)) "everything about Elastic, and especially this most recent announcement of layoffs, scream "bad leadership"" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48667828)) "That's why we had huge backlash when Redis, Elasticsearch, and Terraform went source-available, right?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50290476)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Antfly](https://hackerapproved.com/p/antfly.md): 15 recommend - [Scry](https://hackerapproved.com/p/scry.md): 11 recommend - [Typesense](https://hackerapproved.com/p/typesense.md): 8 recommend - [Manticore Search](https://hackerapproved.com/p/manticore-search.md): 7 recommend - [Vespa](https://hackerapproved.com/p/vespa.md): 7 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Elasticsearch", https://hackerapproved.com/p/elasticsearch/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).