Elasticsearch
Ranked 7 of 38 search engines by recommenders
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.
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.
143 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 68
- criticize it
- 75
- approval share
- 48%
Recommended in 12 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 68 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 0.9 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 12 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Fast, flexible search and aggregations
“Elasticsearch offers a ton of aggregates out of the box for "free" completely configurable by query string.”
Comment from 5 Feb 2026 in “It's 2026, Just Use Postgres” “ElasticSearch is amazing but is really optimized for full text search and aggregations”
Comment from 12 Sep 2026 in “I've operated petabyte-scale ClickHouse clusters for 5 years” “throwing documents into elastic search is really easy and the search is really good”
Comment from 8 Mar 2026 in “You Don't Need a Vector Database” - Comment from 17 Nov 2025 in “Building a Simple Search Engine That Works”
Strong for logs
“Anyone with any sort of scale where you actually need indexing immediately drops journald and uses loki or elasticsearch instead.”
Comment from 13 Aug 2026 in “Single log line is 49KB+ (ext4) / 110KB+ (btrfs) of systemd-journald disk writes” “I have yet to come across anything that performs better and is more flexible for logs”
Comment from 17 Jan 2026 in “Elasticsearch Was Never a Database” “We’re using Greylog+Elastic Search which would totally replace a Loki-only stack.”
Comment from 15 Nov 2025 in “I can't recommend Grafana anymore” Simple to run at small scale
“Elasticsearch is pretty simple to operate unless you have a huge cluster with nodes operating in different modes”
Comment from 15 Jan 2026 in “Ask HN: How are you doing RAG locally?” “ElasitcSearch is fine. If your dataset isn't too big you aren't going to hit shard and memory limits”
Comment from 18 Jun 2026 in “We built a persistent agent memory layer on Elasticsearch with 0.89 recall” “Running a small ES with dual save alongside your relational store is trivial.”
Comment from 21 Aug 2026 in “PostgreSQL for Everything” - Comment from 18 Jun 2026 in “We built a persistent agent memory layer on Elasticsearch with 0.89 recall”
Mature, well-understood, easy to maintain
“Elastic is mature tech everyone understands so it's easy to maintain”
Comment from 4 Apr 2026 in “We replaced RAG with a virtual filesystem for our AI documentation assistant” “elastic gives you so many lessons learned and tunes ootb that it sings”
Comment from 21 Jul 2026 in “American AI is locked down and proprietary. It's losing”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Poor as a primary data store
“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.”
Comment from 16 Jan 2026 in “Elasticsearch Was Never a Database” “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”
Comment from 16 Jan 2026 in “Elasticsearch Was Never a Database” “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”
Comment from 16 Jan 2026 in “Elasticsearch Was Never a Database” - Comment from 16 Jan 2026 in “Elasticsearch Was Never a Database”
Operational complexity and cost
“The operational complexity of running Elasticsearch or a separate vector store alongside Postgres rarely justifies itself”
Comment from 4 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Omni – Open-source workplace search and chat, built on Postgres” “For most of the application out there elastic (or kafka or any other specialized tool) is just too much(and too costly).”
Comment from 19 Aug 2026 in “PostgreSQL for Everything” “Installing & maintaining a Postgres extension is vastly, vastly simpler than running Elasticsearch and Kafka”
Comment from 19 Aug 2026 in “PostgreSQL for Everything” Company and licensing controversies
“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.”
Comment from 17 Nov 2025 in “Israeli-founded app preloaded on Samsung phones is attracting controversy” “everything about Elastic, and especially this most recent announcement of layoffs, scream "bad leadership"”
Comment from 25 Jun 2026 in “Elastic lays off 7% of employees” “That's why we had huge backlash when Redis, Elasticsearch, and Terraform went source-available, right?”
Comment from 29 Oct 2026 in “We're releasing the weights of Mistral Large 4” - Comment from 14 Nov 2025 in “Meeting notes between Forgejo and the Dutch government via Git commits”
Other search engines people recommend
The four most recommended other search engines, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kagi | 732 | 234 | 76% | 13 | 2 yrs106 owners | Approved |
| Google Search | 315 | 1,039 | 23% | 12 | 20 yrs25 owners | — |
| DuckDuckGo | 286 | 204 | 58% | 12 | 3.5 yrs47 owners | — |
| Hister | 81 | 9 | 90% | 9 | 2 mo17 owners | Approved |
| ElasticsearchThis page | 68 | 75 | 48% | 12 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 157 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“That's why we had huge backlash when Redis, Elasticsearch, and Terraform went source-available, right?”
“it's just one part of a query. Everything else we already had (filters etc), just stay and can be combined with vector search.”
“ElasticSearch is amazing but is really optimized for full text search and aggregations”
“Running a small ES with dual save alongside your relational store is trivial.”
“For most of the application out there elastic (or kafka or any other specialized tool) is just too much(and too costly).”
“Installing & maintaining a Postgres extension is vastly, vastly simpler than running Elasticsearch and Kafka”
“Anyone with any sort of scale where you actually need indexing immediately drops journald and uses loki or elasticsearch instead.”
“elastic gives you so many lessons learned and tunes ootb that it sings”
“Until a larger incumbent decided to do their own support (fine), but then sell their service.”
“everything about Elastic, and especially this most recent announcement of layoffs, scream "bad leadership"”
“The Elastic sales folks completely torpedoed the presentation by trying to focus on their AI capabilities”
“makes much more sense to use something like ElasticSearch if you're already in the Amazon cloud”
“I've run ES on an old laptop and it worked really well, so the cost of it can be pretty low if you're still in development”
“picking an underpowered db and having to port to the right one is also quite time consuming”
“ElasitcSearch is fine. If your dataset isn't too big you aren't going to hit shard and memory limits”
“CosmosDB, Google Firestore, Kusto, Elastic, Druid, and many columnar formats are in this category of "magically" faster!”
“If an ex Googler compares Elastic Search to the old company then it mustbe something good.”
“ElasticSearch uses basically the same data structures and gives you the same infrastructure that Google's ~late-00s search stack did”
“if you ingest the data in a good database or metrics engine (I used Elasticsearch), you can query it quite easily.”
“Elastic is mature tech everyone understands so it's easy to maintain”
“hosting costs for 500GB worth of indexes sounds too expensive for this person's use case”
“throwing documents into elastic search is really easy and the search is really good”
“The operational complexity of running Elasticsearch or a separate vector store alongside Postgres rarely justifies itself”
“Elasticsearch offers a ton of aggregates out of the box for "free" completely configurable by query string.”
“Searchable snapshots in Elasticsearch can be backed by S3 and they perform very well.”
“I have yet to come across anything that performs better and is more flexible for logs”
“It's like having a database where you can throw any query at it and it would return a response in reasonable time”
“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”
“Logs are an easy yes. Something that required multi-document transactions is a harder tradeoff.”
“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”
“its gotten a lot more friendly these days, but yes it can be a bit unforgiving at times.”
“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.”
“I really never understood how people could store very important information in ES like it was a database.”
“Elasticsearch is pretty simple to operate unless you have a huge cluster with nodes operating in different modes”
“In one case I solved a lot of issues with Elastic, but it's sort of overkill for 90% of website use cases.”
“no real way of getting around needing to use something like ElasticSearch when Postgres FTS won't cut it”
“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.”
“Elasticsearch's performance is impressive even at an unrecommended scale.”
“We’re using Greylog+Elastic Search which would totally replace a Loki-only stack.”
“IMHO a MIT license is better than AGPL with a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) like with Elastic.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.