Elasticsearch vs MarkLogic

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Elasticsearch

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Elasticsearch vs MarkLogic: What are the differences?

Key Differences Between Elasticsearch and MarkLogic

Elasticsearch and MarkLogic are both popular search and data management platforms, but they have distinct differences. Here are six key differences between the two:

  1. Scalability: Elasticsearch is highly scalable and optimized for horizontal scaling, making it suitable for handling large-scale data and heavy search workloads. On the other hand, while MarkLogic can also handle large quantities of data, it is generally considered to be more suitable for smaller to medium-sized applications.

  2. Data Model: Elasticsearch uses a document-oriented data model, where data is indexed and stored as JSON documents. MarkLogic, on the other hand, uses a flexible, multi-model approach, allowing you to work with a variety of data models including document, relational, and graph data.

  3. Search Capabilities: Elasticsearch is specifically designed for full-text search and offers powerful search capabilities out of the box, including ranked results, aggregations, and filtering options. MarkLogic also supports full-text search, but it offers more advanced features such as faceted search, semantic search, and entity extraction.

  4. Data Management: MarkLogic provides a comprehensive set of features for managing data, including ACID-compliant transactions, robust security controls, and built-in governance capabilities. Elasticsearch, while offering some data management functionalities, focuses more on search and scalability rather than comprehensive data management.

  5. Integration and Ecosystem: Elasticsearch has a rich ecosystem of plugins and integrations, making it easy to connect with other systems and tools. It integrates seamlessly with popular tools like Kibana, Logstash, and Beats. MarkLogic, on the other hand, offers a more integrated and unified platform, with a wide range of built-in capabilities for data ingestion, transformation, analysis, and visualization.

  6. Commercial vs Open Source: Elasticsearch is an open-source search and analytics engine that can be freely used and extended. While there is a commercial version available from Elastic, the core functionality is open source. MarkLogic, on the other hand, is a commercial product that requires a paid license for full use. This can impact the decision-making process, particularly for organizations with specific budget constraints.

In summary, Elasticsearch excels in scalability, document-oriented data model, and search capabilities, with a large ecosystem of integrations. MarkLogic, on the other hand, offers a flexible multi-model approach, comprehensive data management features, and a more integrated and unified platform. The choice between the two will depend on the specific requirements and priorities of the project or organization.

Advice on Elasticsearch and MarkLogic
Rana Usman Shahid
Chief Technology Officer at TechAvanza · | 6 upvotes · 371.2K views
Needs advice
on
AlgoliaAlgoliaElasticsearchElasticsearch
and
FirebaseFirebase

Hey everybody! (1) I am developing an android application. I have data of around 3 million record (less than a TB). I want to save that data in the cloud. Which company provides the best cloud database services that would suit my scenario? It should be secured, long term useable, and provide better services. I decided to use Firebase Realtime database. Should I stick with Firebase or are there any other companies that provide a better service?

(2) I have the functionality of searching data in my app. Same data (less than a TB). Which search solution should I use in this case? I found Elasticsearch and Algolia search. It should be secure and fast. If any other company provides better services than these, please feel free to suggest them.

Thank you!

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Replies (2)
Josh Dzielak
Co-Founder & CTO at Orbit · | 8 upvotes · 276K views
Recommends
on
AlgoliaAlgolia

Hi Rana, good question! From my Firebase experience, 3 million records is not too big at all, as long as the cost is within reason for you. With Firebase you will be able to access the data from anywhere, including an android app, and implement fine-grained security with JSON rules. The real-time-ness works perfectly. As a fully managed database, Firebase really takes care of everything. The only thing to watch out for is if you need complex query patterns - Firestore (also in the Firebase family) can be a better fit there.

To answer question 2: the right answer will depend on what's most important to you. Algolia is like Firebase is that it is fully-managed, very easy to set up, and has great SDKs for Android. Algolia is really a full-stack search solution in this case, and it is easy to connect with your Firebase data. Bear in mind that Algolia does cost money, so you'll want to make sure the cost is okay for you, but you will save a lot of engineering time and never have to worry about scale. The search-as-you-type performance with Algolia is flawless, as that is a primary aspect of its design. Elasticsearch can store tons of data and has all the flexibility, is hosted for cheap by many cloud services, and has many users. If you haven't done a lot with search before, the learning curve is higher than Algolia for getting the results ranked properly, and there is another learning curve if you want to do the DevOps part yourself. Both are very good platforms for search, Algolia shines when buliding your app is the most important and you don't want to spend many engineering hours, Elasticsearch shines when you have a lot of data and don't mind learning how to run and optimize it.

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Mike Endale
Recommends
on
Cloud FirestoreCloud Firestore

Rana - we use Cloud Firestore at our startup. It handles many million records without any issues. It provides you the same set of features that the Firebase Realtime Database provides on top of the indexing and security trims. The only thing to watch out for is to make sure your Cloud Functions have proper exception handling and there are no infinite loop in the code. This will be too costly if not caught quickly.

For search; Algolia is a great option, but cost is a real consideration. Indexing large number of records can be cost prohibitive for most projects. Elasticsearch is a solid alternative, but requires a little additional work to configure and maintain if you want to self-host.

Hope this helps.

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Pros of Elasticsearch
Pros of MarkLogic
  • 327
    Powerful api
  • 315
    Great search engine
  • 230
    Open source
  • 214
    Restful
  • 199
    Near real-time search
  • 97
    Free
  • 84
    Search everything
  • 54
    Easy to get started
  • 45
    Analytics
  • 26
    Distributed
  • 6
    Fast search
  • 5
    More than a search engine
  • 3
    Highly Available
  • 3
    Awesome, great tool
  • 3
    Great docs
  • 3
    Easy to scale
  • 2
    Fast
  • 2
    Easy setup
  • 2
    Great customer support
  • 2
    Intuitive API
  • 2
    Great piece of software
  • 2
    Reliable
  • 2
    Potato
  • 2
    Nosql DB
  • 2
    Document Store
  • 1
    Not stable
  • 1
    Scalability
  • 1
    Open
  • 1
    Github
  • 1
    Elaticsearch
  • 1
    Actively developing
  • 1
    Responsive maintainers on GitHub
  • 1
    Ecosystem
  • 1
    Easy to get hot data
  • 0
    Community
  • 5
    RDF Triples
  • 3
    JSON
  • 3
    Marklogic is absolutely stable and very fast
  • 3
    REST API
  • 3
    JavaScript
  • 3
    Enterprise
  • 2
    Semantics
  • 2
    Multi-model DB
  • 1
    Bitemporal
  • 1
    Tiered Storage

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Cons of Elasticsearch
Cons of MarkLogic
  • 7
    Resource hungry
  • 6
    Diffecult to get started
  • 5
    Expensive
  • 4
    Hard to keep stable at large scale
    Be the first to leave a con

    Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

    What is Elasticsearch?

    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).

    What is MarkLogic?

    MarkLogic is the only Enterprise NoSQL database, bringing all the features you need into one unified system: a document-centric, schema-agnostic, structure-aware, clustered, transactional, secure, database server with built-in search and a full suite of application services.

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    What companies use Elasticsearch?
    What companies use MarkLogic?
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    What tools integrate with Elasticsearch?
    What tools integrate with MarkLogic?

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    Blog Posts

    May 21 2019 at 12:20AM

    Elastic

    ElasticsearchKibanaLogstash+4
    12
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    GitHubPythonReact+42
    49
    40724
    GitHubPythonNode.js+47
    54
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    What are some alternatives to Elasticsearch and MarkLogic?
    Datadog
    Datadog is the leading service for cloud-scale monitoring. It is used by IT, operations, and development teams who build and operate applications that run on dynamic or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Start monitoring in minutes with Datadog!
    Solr
    Solr is the popular, blazing fast open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, near real-time indexing, dynamic clustering, database integration, rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling, and geospatial search. Solr is highly reliable, scalable and fault tolerant, providing distributed indexing, replication and load-balanced querying, automated failover and recovery, centralized configuration and more. Solr powers the search and navigation features of many of the world's largest internet sites.
    Lucene
    Lucene Core, our flagship sub-project, provides Java-based indexing and search technology, as well as spellchecking, hit highlighting and advanced analysis/tokenization capabilities.
    MongoDB
    MongoDB stores data in JSON-like documents that can vary in structure, offering a dynamic, flexible schema. MongoDB was also designed for high availability and scalability, with built-in replication and auto-sharding.
    Algolia
    Our mission is to make you a search expert. Push data to our API to make it searchable in real time. Build your dream front end with one of our web or mobile UI libraries. Tune relevance and get analytics right from your dashboard.
    See all alternatives