Azure Search vs Elasticsearch: What are the differences?

Azure Search: Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development. Azure Search makes it easy to add powerful and sophisticated search capabilities to your website or application. Quickly and easily tune search results and construct rich, fine-tuned ranking models to tie search results to business goals. Reliable throughput and storage provide fast search indexing and querying to support time-sensitive search scenarios; Elasticsearch: Open Source, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine. Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine capable of storing data and searching it in near real time. Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats and Logstash are the Elastic Stack (sometimes called the ELK Stack).

Azure Search and Elasticsearch can be categorized as "Search as a Service" tools.

Some of the features offered by Azure Search are:

• Powerful, reliable performance
• Easily tune search indices to meet business goals
• Scale out simply

On the other hand, Elasticsearch provides the following key features:

• Distributed and Highly Available Search Engine.
• Multi Tenant with Multi Types.
• Various set of APIs including RESTful

"Easy to set up" is the primary reason why developers consider Azure Search over the competitors, whereas "Powerful api" was stated as the key factor in picking Elasticsearch.

Elasticsearch is an open source tool with 42.4K GitHub stars and 14.2K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Elasticsearch's open source repository on GitHub.