Rockset versus Elasticsearch
for Real-Time Analytics

Request a Demo
Or start a free trial ->

4x

Faster Ingestion

Ingest high volume event streams and CDC streams. Rockset’s Converged Index is mutable at an individual field level, with highly efficient upserts. Achieve better performance at scale with full isolation between ingest compute and query compute.

44%

Lower Infrastructure Costs

Eliminate hardware over-provisioning with compute-storage and compute-compute separation. No replicas needed for isolation. Run multiple applications on a single real-time dataset.

20x

Faster Development Time

Elasticsearch was built for the datacenter era, demanding constant capacity planning, cluster management, re-indexing and re-sharding. Deploy real-time analytics 20x faster with Rockset’s fully managed cloud-native real-time analytics database.

SQL

Joins

Run standard SQL, including complex JOINs on deeply nested JSON, with Rockset’s compute-efficient Converged Index. No denormalization required. The lack of performant JOINs in Elasticsearch is a huge constraint.

Whatnot logo
Rockset delivered true real-time ingestion and queries, with sub-50 millisecond end-to-end latency that didn’t just match Elasticsearch, but did so at much lower operational effort and cost.

Xin Xia, Marketplace and Discovery

Read More
Command Alkon logo
We chose Rockset over Elasticsearch for our application. We now look to use Rockset for any search and analytics feature on any data. We absolutely love Rockset. It’s a game changer for us.

Doug Moore, VP of Cloud

Read More
Compute and Storage
Elasticsearch's tightly coupled architecture leads to overprovisioned clusters.
Elasticsearch clusters contain both compute and storage, which cannot be scaled independently. Because clusters are responsible for ingestion and queries, writes and reads can interfere with each other. At peak usage, compute contention renders apps unresponsive.
SQL-style JOINs
JOINs on Elasticsearch are prohibitively expensive.
You’ll need to denormalize data, perform application-side joins, use nested objects or parent-child relationships, each of which is expensive and complex.
Streaming Ingest
Elasticsearch users batch updates to minimize the cost.
When an update is made to a document in Elasticsearch, the old document is deleted and the new one is buffered and merged into a new segment. With frequent inserts and updates, expect to budget 70% of your CPU costs in Elasticsearch to be on merge operations. When you’re at tens of terabytes of data, this is a very slow and expensive process to execute a few times a week.
Operational Burden
Even Elasticsearch cloud requires in-depth knowledge to control for costs
Elasticsearch is a highly-complex distributed database that requires data management, query DSL, data processing and cluster management. One user estimated a 6 month roadmap for their application on Elasticsearch and 3 full-time engineers to manage the system.

Resources



Related BlogRelated Blog

Benchmarking Elasticsearch and Rockset: Rockset achieves up to 4X faster streaming data ingestion

We evaluated Elasticsearch and Rockset streaming ingestion performance on throughput and latency. In this blog, we walk through the benchmark framework, configuration and results.

Read more->
Related BlogRelated Blog

5 Steps for Migrating from Elasticsearch to Rockset for Real-Time Analytics

Best practices from customers who migrated from Elasticsearch to Rockset in days to weeks by avoiding common migration pitfalls.

Read more->
Related BlogRelated Blog

Case Study: How Rockset Turbocharges Real-Time Personalization at Whatnot

Whatnot implemented real-time personalization for their live shopping platform using Rockset, which proved a more efficient alternative to Elasticsearch.

Read more->
Related BlogRelated Blog

Introducing Compute-Compute Separation for Real-Time Analytics

Rockset unveils compute-compute separation that eliminates the challenge of compute contention and makes it possible to build efficient, reliable real-time applications at massive scale.

Read more->
Related BlogRelated Blog

Can I Do SQL-Style Joins in Elasticsearch?

We explore how to perform the equivalent of SQL joins when using Elasticsearch. While joins are primarily an SQL concept, they are equally important in NoSQL

Read more->
Related WebinarRelated Webinar

CTO Talk: Comparing Elasticsearch and Rockset Streaming Ingest and Query Performance

Hear how Venkat had a front-row seat in watching real-time data emerge at Facebook, and the insights he gained about the future of data processing that led him to start Rockset.

Read more->

Demo Rockset

First Name*

Last Name*

Business Email*

I agree to receive other communications from Rockset

Switch from Elasticsearch to Rockset for real-time analytics. Get more from your search and analytics database for less compute.

Rockset:

Reduce infra costs by 44%

Increase ingest speeds by 4x

Full SQL, including joins

20x faster development