Solr or ElasticSearch?
The right choice depends on a range of application-specific technical factors. This article provides non-technical background information about these open source search projects.
HEADLINES
- Both Solr and ElasticSearch are built on the Lucene search engine
- Lucene is a highly reliable and very widely used search engine, first established in 1999. Lucene has been an Apache open source project since 2001
- Solr is an enterprise search platform based on Lucene, and has been in open source since 2006. Solr is very widely deployed, and is supported by an Apache community of more than 100 developers and code committers
- ElasticSearch is a comparatively recent development which was first launched 2010. Unlike Lucene and Solr, ElasticSearch is not a project of the Apache Software Foundation, but is based at Github, a commercial Web-based hosting service. ElasticSearch is however licensed for use under the same Apache 2.0 License as Solr
HIGH LEVEL DIFFERENCES
SOLR- Simply through its maturity, wide deployment and very active developer community, Solr remains the default choice for open source search projects
- Solr provides a highly detailed functional environment and a wide range of plug-ins are available
- Relatively immature by comparison, and its development community is still small, although ElasticSearch is being developed with more of a focus than Solr
- Specifically, ElasticSearch seeks to make it easier to create and implement large search systems. It is schema-free and document-oriented, and for some projects these are important technical innovations. ElasticSearch has been designed with the cloud-era in mind
COMMERCIAL MODELS
- The originators of Solr subsequently formed a commercial company Lucidworks (publicly launched 2009 as Lucid Imagination) which provides a licensable enterprise search system built on Solr. Lucid was launched at a time when a substantial development community for Solr was already established
- The founders of ElasticSearch launched a parallel commercial company (headquartered in the Netherlands) comparatively quickly. Unlike Lucidworks, their focus is on training, support and consulting rather than software licensing
Search Technologies provides implementation and consulting services for both Solr and ElasticSearch. Contact us for an informal discussion of your requirements.
