# Elasticsearch vs Vespa

**Leader by vioscaleAI score:** Elasticsearch

| Attribute | Elasticsearch | Vespa |
|---|---|---|
| **vioscaleAI score** | 73 (58% (medium)) | 58 (75% (high)) |
| activity.commits_last_30d | 100 | 100 |
| adoption.dependent_repos | 18,551 | 7 |
| adoption.github_stars | 78,195 | 7,129 |
| content.faq | `[{"answer":"A search and analytics platform that ingests, stores, and searches structured, unstructured, and vector data in real time. Supports full-text search, vector search, observability analytics, and security event analysis through a unified REST API and query language. It is indexed under Search Engines.","source":"https://www.elastic.co/pricing/cloud-hosted","question":"What is Elasticsearch?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Elasticsearch is a paid product; published pricing starts at $99 per month. It is sold across 4 plans (Standard, Gold, Platinum and Enterprise). There is no free tier. Prices are published openly on the vendor's own pricing page. Pricing changes often, so verify at source before relying on it.","source":"https://www.elastic.co/pricing/cloud-hosted","question":"How much does Elasticsearch cost?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Elasticsearch supports the web, Windows, macOS, Linux and a command-line interface. Platforms we have not confirmed are simply not listed here rather than ruled out.","source":"https://www.elastic.co/pricing/cloud-hosted","question":"What platforms does Elasticsearch support?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Yes. Elasticsearch can be deployed cloud / SaaS, on-premise and self-hosted, so it does not have to run on the vendor's infrastructure.","source":"https://www.elastic.co/pricing/cloud-hosted","question":"Can Elasticsearch be self-hosted?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have confirmed 32 integrations for Elasticsearch, including Slack, Jira, ServiceNow, PagerDuty, Microsoft Teams, IBM Resilient, xMatters and GitHub, plus 24 more. This is what we could verify from public sources, so the vendor may support others we have not indexed.","source":"https://www.elastic.co/pricing/cloud-hosted","question":"What does Elasticsearch integrate with?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have independently confirmed GDPR for Elasticsearch. Certifications we do not list are ones we have not been able to verify from public sources, which is not the same as Elasticsearch not holding them. Always confirm compliance directly before you rely on it.","source":"https://www.elastic.co/trust/ai-data-faq","question":"What security certifications does Elasticsearch have?","confidence":0.7},{"answer":"Elasticsearch is available worldwide. Its primary market is the United States.","source":"https://www.elastic.co/pricing/cloud-hosted","question":"Where is Elasticsearch available?","confidence":0.75}]` | `[{"answer":"A distributed serving engine that unifies retrieval, ranking, machine learning inference, and real-time serving for business-critical AI applications. It is indexed under Search Engines.","source":"https://vespa.ai/pricing/","question":"What is Vespa?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Vespa offers a free tier, so you can start without paying. Pricing changes often, so verify at source before relying on it.","source":"https://vespa.ai/pricing/","question":"Is Vespa free?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Vespa supports the web and a command-line interface. Platforms we have not confirmed are simply not listed here rather than ruled out.","source":"https://vespa.ai/pricing/","question":"What platforms does Vespa support?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Yes. Vespa can be deployed cloud / SaaS, hybrid and self-hosted, so it does not have to run on the vendor's infrastructure.","source":"https://vespa.ai/pricing/","question":"Can Vespa be self-hosted?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have confirmed 12 integrations for Vespa, including Python, Cohere, TwelveLabs, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Google Gemini, Cursor and VSCode, plus 4 more. This is what we could verify from public sources, so the vendor may support others we have not indexed.","source":"https://vespa.ai/pricing/","question":"What does Vespa integrate with?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have independently confirmed SOC 2 and GDPR for Vespa. Certifications we do not list are ones we have not been able to verify from public sources, which is not the same as Vespa not holding them. Always confirm compliance directly before you rely on it.","source":"https://trust.vespa.ai","question":"What security certifications does Vespa have?","confidence":0.7},{"answer":"Yes. Vespa is published under the Apache-2.0 licence, a permissive licence that generally allows commercial use and modification. Licence terms can change between releases, so verify against the repository for the version you intend to use.","source":"https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa","question":"Is Vespa open source?","confidence":0.95},{"answer":"Vespa is available worldwide. The vendor is headquartered in Norway.","source":"https://vespa.ai/pricing/","question":"Where is Vespa available?","confidence":0.75}]` |
| deployment.options | `{"cloud":true,"self_hosted":true}` | `{"cloud":true,"hybrid":true,"self_hosted":true}` |
| description.long | A search platform that distributes data across multiple nodes to handle large-scale indexing and retrieval through standard web APIs. | A distributed search and AI platform that handles vectors, tensors, text, and structured data at scale, delivering sub-100ms query latency with continuous data updates and machine-learned relevance ranking. |
| features.capabilities | `{"hosting":"both","faceting":"yes","query_dsl":"ES|QL","data_model":"document","deployment":"self_hosted","geo_search":true,"distributed":"sharded","replication":true,"sql_support":true,"index_engine":"lucene","licence_class":"source_available","log_analytics":true,"managed_cloud":true,"multi_tenancy":true,"vector_search":"hybrid_fusion","typo_tolerance":"built_in","full_text_search":true,"relevance_tuning":"ltr","realtime_indexing":"near_real_time","horizontal_scaling":true}` | `{"deployment":"self_hosted","distributed":"sharded","index_engine":"custom","licence_class":"permissive_oss","vector_search":"hybrid_fusion","typo_tolerance":"configurable","deployment_model":"hybrid","relevance_tuning":"ranking_rules","realtime_indexing":"near_real_time","generative_ai_answer_synthesis_rag":true,"multi_lingual_semantic_understanding":true,"hybrid_dense_and_sparse_lexical_reranking":true}` |
| integrations.count | 350 | 12 |
| integrations.list | `[{"name":"Slack"},{"name":"Jira"},{"name":"ServiceNow"},{"name":"PagerDuty"},{"name":"Microsoft Teams"},{"name":"IBM Resilient"},{"name":"xMatters"},{"name":"GitHub"},{"name":"Jina AI"},{"name":"NVIDIA AI"},{"name":"Prometheus"},{"name":"Grafana"},{"name":"AWS Bedrock"},{"name":"Sarvam AI"},{"name":"Google ADK"},{"name":"LlamaParse"},{"name":"Mistral"},{"name":"Elastic Agent"},{"name":"Beats"},{"name":"Logstash"},{"name":"Filebeat"},{"name":"Metricbeat"},{"name":"Heartbeat"},{"name":"Webhooks"},{"name":"S3"},{"name":"OpenAI","native":true,"category":"ai","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"Amazon Bedrock","native":true,"category":"ai","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"Azure OpenAI Service","native":true,"category":"ai","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"NVIDIA","native":true,"category":"ai","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"Okta","native":true,"category":"auth","direction":"inbound"},{"name":"Auth0","native":true,"category":"auth","direction":"inbound"},{"name":"AWS S3","native":true,"category":"storage","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"Kubernetes","native":true,"category":"infrastructure","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"Terraform","native":true,"category":"infrastructure","direction":"outbound"},{"name":"GitHub Copilot","native":true,"category":"ai","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"Anthropic","native":false,"category":"ai","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"LlamaIndex","category":"ai"},{"name":"Red Hat","category":"infrastructure"},{"name":"Alibaba Cloud","category":"cloud"},{"name":"IBM watsonx","category":"ai"},{"name":"Cohere","category":"ai"},{"name":"LangChain","category":"ai"},{"name":"Claude","category":"ai"}]` | `[{"name":"Python"},{"name":"Cohere"},{"name":"TwelveLabs"},{"name":"Claude Code"},{"name":"OpenAI Codex"},{"name":"Google Gemini"},{"name":"Cursor"},{"name":"VSCode"},{"name":"IntelliJ"},{"name":"PyCharm"},{"name":"AWS"},{"name":"GCP"}]` |
| language.primary | Java | Java |
| license.spdx | - | Apache-2.0 |
| market.availability | `{"primaryMarkets":["US"],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` | `{"hqCountry":"NO","primaryMarkets":[],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` |
| platform.support | `{"cli":true,"mac":true,"web":true,"linux":true,"windows":true}` | `{"cli":true,"web":true}` |
| pricing | `{"type":"subscription","plans":[{"free":false,"name":"Standard","summary":"$99/month","features":["Distributed Elasticsearch across AWS, Azure, GCP","ES|QL query language and APIs","Default monitoring and AutoOps","Alerting with detection engine","Malware prevention","Cloud security posture management","APM, logging, metrics","Synthetic monitoring (limited)","Universal Profiling","LLM observability","Limited support (3-business day response)"],"components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":99,"period":"month","currency":"USD"}],"description":"Entry-level plan with distributed Elasticsearch across cloud providers, API access, monitoring, security alerts, and observability basics.","contactSales":false},{"free":false,"name":"Gold","summary":"$114/month","features":["All Standard features","Reporting","Third-party alerting actions","Watcher","Multi-stack monitoring","Enterprise Search","External detection notifications","Base support (business hours, 1-day response for high)"],"components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":114,"period":"month","currency":"USD"}],"description":"Includes Standard features plus reporting, enterprise search, advanced security, and base support with business hours availability.","contactSales":false},{"free":false,"name":"Platinum","summary":"$131/month with SLA","features":["All Gold features","Machine learning (anomaly detection, supervised learning)","Vector search with ELSER and e5 models","Cross-cluster replication","Log categorization","Service maps, tail-based sampling","APM correlations","ML-powered SIEM rules","Enhanced support (24/7, 1-hour urgent response)","99.95% uptime SLA"],"components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":131,"period":"month","currency":"USD"}],"description":"Includes Gold features plus machine learning, advanced security, vector search with ML models, semantic reranking, and 24/7 support.","contactSales":false},{"free":false,"name":"Enterprise","summary":"$184/month","features":["All Platinum features","Searchable snapshots in cold/frozen tiers","Elastic Maps Server","Cross-cluster search with ES|QL","ES|QL Data Federation (query S3 directly)","GPU inference with Elastic Inference Service","Elastic Agent Builder with LLM","AI-powered dashboard creation","Elastic Workflows (automation)","SAML SSO","AI Playground for RAG","Inference Service Management","Semantic reranking with ML models","Learn-to-Rank personalization","Storage optimization (DiskBBQ)","Attack Discovery with agentic investigation","Premium support (30-minute urgent response)","Cloud workload protection"],"components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":184,"period":"month","currency":"USD"}],"description":"Includes Platinum features plus searchable snapshots, GPU inference, AI-driven workflows, agent building, data federation, and premium support.","contactSales":false}],"addOns":[{"name":"Synthetic Monitoring - Browser Tests","components":[{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"test run"},"kind":"metered","amount":0.0123,"currency":"USD"}]},{"name":"Synthetic Monitoring - Lightweight Tests","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":28,"period":"month","currency":"USD"}]}],"summary":"From $99/month. Free 14-day trial available.","currency":"USD","freeTier":false,"sourceUrl":"https://www.elastic.co/pricing/cloud-hosted","retrievedAt":"2026-09-07T13:11:22.839Z","freeTrialDays":14,"startingPrice":{"amount":99,"period":"month","currency":"USD"},"billingPeriods":["month"]}` | `{"type":"free","freeTier":true,"sourceUrl":"https://vespa.ai","retrievedAt":"2026-10-14T11:26:49.809Z"}` |
| pricing.free_tier | no | yes |
| pricing.model | commercial | free |
| pricing.price_level | high | free |
| pricing.starting_price | `{"amount":99,"currency":"USD"}` | - |
| pricing.transparent | yes | no |
| release.cadence_days | 1 | 3 |
| release.history | `[{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v8.19.22","date":"2026-09-23T15:20:20Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.19.22"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.5.4","date":"2026-09-15T18:19:18Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.5.4"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.4.7","date":"2026-09-15T18:19:34Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.4.7"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.5.3","date":"2026-09-03T10:08:41Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.5.3"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.4.6","date":"2026-09-01T12:51:12Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.4.6"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v8.19.21","date":"2026-09-01T12:53:43Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.19.21"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.5.2","date":"2026-08-20T16:44:04Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.5.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.5.1","date":"2026-08-11T17:58:01Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.5.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.4.5","date":"2026-08-11T17:57:54Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.4.5"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v8.19.20","date":"2026-08-11T18:24:43Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.19.20"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.5.0","date":"2026-08-04T11:46:37Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.5.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.4.4","date":"2026-07-21T12:56:20Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.4.4"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.3.8","date":"2026-07-21T12:56:46Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.3.8"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v8.19.19","date":"2026-07-21T13:28:17Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.19.19"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v8.19.18","date":"2026-06-30T16:43:41Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.19.18"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.3.7","date":"2026-06-30T16:47:02Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.3.7"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.4.3","date":"2026-06-30T14:30:13Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.4.3"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v8.19.17","date":"2026-06-23T13:59:04Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.19.17"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.3.6","date":"2026-06-23T14:09:56Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.3.6"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/releases/tag/v9.4.2","date":"2026-05-28T14:59:44Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.4.2"}]` | `[{"url":"https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/releases/tag/lsp-v2.6.1","date":"2026-10-06T14:56:06Z","type":"stable","version":"lsp-v2.6.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/releases/tag/v8.763.13","date":"2026-10-05T02:26:25Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.763.13"},{"url":"https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/releases/tag/v8.753.16","date":"2026-09-16T23:24:06Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.753.16"},{"url":"https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/releases/tag/lsp-v2.6.0","date":"2026-09-16T09:27:29Z","type":"stable","version":"lsp-v2.6.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/releases/tag/v8.751.13","date":"2026-09-07T02:23:38Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.751.13"},{"url":"https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/releases/tag/v8.750.13","date":"2026-09-03T05:43:15Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.750.13"},{"url":"https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/releases/tag/v8.748.3","date":"2026-09-01T07:14:29Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.748.3"},{"url":"https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/releases/tag/v8.746.22","date":"2026-09-01T07:14:22Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.746.22"},{"url":"https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/releases/tag/lsp-v2.5.0","date":"2026-08-24T08:45:45Z","type":"stable","version":"lsp-v2.5.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/releases/tag/v8.738.17","date":"2026-08-13T04:51:03Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.738.17"},{"url":"https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/releases/tag/v8.736.12","date":"2026-08-10T02:24:28Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.736.12"},{"url":"https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/releases/tag/v8.733.3","date":"2026-08-05T09:03:54Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.733.3"},{"url":"https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/releases/tag/v8.730.36","date":"2026-07-28T04:47:04Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.730.36"},{"url":"https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/releases/tag/v8.719.5","date":"2026-07-07T02:30:19Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.719.5"},{"url":"https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/releases/tag/v8.709.19","date":"2026-06-18T18:42:59Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.709.19"},{"url":"https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/releases/tag/v8.708.30","date":"2026-06-18T04:26:19Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.708.30"},{"url":"https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/releases/tag/v8.707.16","date":"2026-06-16T14:15:49Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.707.16"},{"url":"https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/releases/tag/v8.703.17","date":"2026-06-09T16:31:53Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.703.17"},{"url":"https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/releases/tag/v8.702.91","date":"2026-06-09T02:20:48Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.702.91"},{"url":"https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/releases/tag/lsp-v2.4.10","date":"2026-06-08T04:18:37Z","type":"stable","version":"lsp-v2.4.10"}]` |
| reliability.sla_pct | 99.95 | - |
| reliability.status_page | yes | yes |
| security.disclosure_policy | - | yes |
| security.gdpr | yes | yes |
| security.scorecard | 6.4 | 5.9 |
| security.soc2 | - | yes |
| security.trust_center | https://www.elastic.co/legal/trade-compliance | - |
| security.vulnerabilities | `{"count":45,"source":"https://advisories.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/advisories?ecosystem=maven&package_name=org.elasticsearch%3Aelasticsearch&per_page=100","last_12m":2,"max_severity":"HIGH"}` | `{"count":0,"source":"https://advisories.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/advisories?ecosystem=maven&package_name=com.yahoo.vespa%3Acontainer-test&per_page=100","last_12m":0,"max_severity":null}` |

## Capabilities (Search Engines)

| Capability | Elasticsearch | Vespa |
|---|:--:|:--:|
| **Deployment** |  |  |
| Deployment | Self-hosted | Self-hosted |
| **Architecture** |  |  |
| Index engine | Lucene | Custom |
| **Query** |  |  |
| Query DSL (JSON / SQL / params / GraphQL) | ES|QL | - |
| Faceting & filtering | Yes | - |
| Geo search | ✓ | - |
| **Relevance** |  |  |
| Typo tolerance / fuzzy | Built-in | Configurable |
| Relevance tuning | Learning-to-rank | Ranking rules |
| **Vector** |  |  |
| Vector / hybrid search | Dense + lexical fusion | Dense + lexical fusion |
| **Scale** |  |  |
| Distributed / horizontal scale | Sharded | Sharded |
| Multi-tenancy (indexes / collections / tenants) | ✓ | - |
| **Ingest** |  |  |
| Real-time indexing | Near-real-time | Near-real-time |
| **Workload** |  |  |
| Log / analytics workload | ✓ | - |
| **Licensing** |  |  |
| Licence class | Source-available (SSPL / Elastic) | Permissive OSS |

*Source: vioscaleAI. Generated 2026-10-16T21:42:33.242Z. "-" = undocumented, not absent.*