Apache Solr vs Elasticsearch



API

Feature Solr 7.2.1 Elasticsearch 6.2.4
Format XML, CSV, JSON JSON
HTTP REST API
Binary API  SolrJ  TransportClient, Thrift (through a plugin)
JMX support  ES specific stats are exposed through the REST API
Official client libraries Java Java, Groovy, PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python, .NET, Javascript Official list of clients
Community client libraries PHP, Ruby, Perl, Scala, Python, .NET, Javascript, Go, Erlang, Clojure Clojure, Cold Fusion, Erlang, Go, Groovy, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, .NET, OCaml, Perl, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, Scala, Smalltalk, Vert.x Complete list
3rd-party product integration (open-source) Drupal, Magento, Django, ColdFusion, Wordpress, OpenCMS, Plone, Typo3, ez Publish, Symfony2, Riak (via Yokozuna) Drupal, Django, Symfony2, Wordpress, CouchBase
3rd-party product integration (commercial) DataStax Enterprise Search, Cloudera Search, Hortonworks Data Platform, MapR SearchBlox, Hortonworks Data Platform, MapR etc Complete list
Output JSON, XML, PHP, Python, Ruby, CSV, Velocity, XSLT, native Java JSON, XML/HTML (via plugin)



Infrastructure

Feature Solr 7.2.1 Elasticsearch 6.2.4
Master-slave replication  Not an issue because shards are replicated across nodes.
Integrated snapshot and restore Filesystem Filesystem, AWS Cloud Plugin for S3 repositories, HDFS Plugin for Hadoop environments, Azure Cloud Plugin for Azure storage repositories



Indexing

Feature Solr 7.2.1 Elasticsearch 6.2.4
Data Import DataImportHandler - JDBC, CSV, XML, Tika, URL, Flat File [DEPRECATED in 2.x] Rivers modules - ActiveMQ, Amazon SQS, CouchDB, Dropbox, DynamoDB, FileSystem, Git, GitHub, Hazelcast, JDBC, JMS, Kafka, LDAP, MongoDB, neo4j, OAI, RabbitMQ, Redis, RSS, Sofa, Solr, St9, Subversion, Twitter, Wikipedia
ID field for updates and deduplication
DocValues
Partial Doc Updates  with stored fields  with _source field
Custom Analyzers and Tokenizers
Per-field analyzer chain
Per-doc/query analyzer chain
Index-time synonyms  Supports Solr and Wordnet synonym format
Query-time synonyms  Solr 6 provides proper multi-word synonyms via SynonymGraphFilter  Synonym Graph Token Filter is in beta in ES 6.2
Multiple indexes
Near-Realtime Search/Indexing
Complex documents
Schemaless
Multiple document types per schema  One set of fields per schema, one schema per core
Online schema changes  Schemaless mode or via dynamic fields.  Only backward-compatible changes.
Apache Tika integration
Dynamic fields
Field copying  via multi-fields
Hash-based deduplication  Murmur plugin or ER plugin
Index-time sorting



Searching

Feature Solr 7.2.1 Elasticsearch 6.2.4
Lucene Query parsing
Structured Query DSL  JSON Query DSL is new in Solr 7.x
Span queries  via SOLR-2703
Spatial/geo search
Multi-point spatial search
Faceting  Top N term accuracy can be controlled with shard_size
Advanced Faceting  New Analytics component and JSON faceting API  blog post
Geo-distance Faceting
Pivot Facets
More Like This
Boosting by functions
Boosting using scripting languages
Push Queries  Via Streaming Expressions  Percolation. Distributed percolation supported in 1.0
Field collapsing/Results grouping
Query Re-Ranking  via Rescoring or a plugin
Index-based Spellcheck  Phrase Suggester
Wordlist-based Spellcheck
Autocomplete
Document-oriented Autocomplete  Solr suggester return phrases not documents.
Learning to Rank  Via https://github.com/o19s/elasticsearch-learning-to-rank
Query elevation workaround
Intra-index joins  via parent-child query  via has_children and top_children queries
Inter-index joins  Joined index has to be single-shard and replicated across all nodes.
Resultset Scrolling  via scan search type
Filter queries  also supports filtering by native scripts
Filter execution order  local params and cache property
Alternative QueryParsers  DisMax, eDisMax  query_string, dis_max, match, multi_match etc
Negative boosting  but awkward. Involves positively boosting the inverse set of negatively-boosted documents.
Search across multiple indexes  it can search across multiple compatible collections
Result highlighting
Custom Similarity
Searcher warming on index reload  Warmers API
Term Vectors API
SQL queries  Via Parallel SQL. SolrCloud only
Distributed Map/Reduce processing  Via Streaming Expressions. SolrCloud only



Customizability

Feature Solr 7.2.1 Elasticsearch 6.2.4
Pluggable API endpoints
Pluggable search workflow  via SearchComponents
Pluggable update workflow  via UpdateRequestProcessor
Pluggable Analyzers/Tokenizers
Pluggable QueryParsers
Pluggable Field Types
Pluggable Function queries
Pluggable scoring scripts
Pluggable hashing
Pluggable webapps  [site plugins DEPRECATED in 5.x] blog post
Automated plugin installation  Installable from GitHub, maven, sonatype or elasticsearch.org



Distributed

Feature Solr 7.2.1 Elasticsearch 6.2.4
Self-contained cluster  Depends on separate ZooKeeper server  Only Elasticsearch nodes
Automatic node discovery  ZooKeeper  internal Zen Discovery or ZooKeeper
Partition tolerance  The partition without a ZooKeeper quorum will stop accepting indexing requests or cluster state changes, while the partition with a quorum continues to function.  Partitioned clusters can diverge unless discovery.zen.minimum_master_nodes set to at least N/2+1, where N is the size of the cluster. If configured correctly, the partition without a quorum will stop operating, while the other continues to work. See this
Automatic failover  If all nodes storing a shard and its replicas fail, client requests will fail, unless requests are made with the shards.tolerant=true parameter, in which case partial results are retuned from the available shards.
Automatic leader election
Shard replication
Sharding
Automatic shard rebalancing  Solr Autoscaling is new in Solr 7.  it can be machine, rack, availability zone, and/or data center aware. Arbitrary tags can be assigned to nodes and it can be configured to not assign the same shard and its replicates on a node with the same tags.
Change # of shards  Shards can be added (when using implicit routing) or split (when using compositeId). Cannot be lowered. Replicas can be increased anytime.  each index has 5 shards by default. Number of primary shards cannot be changed once the index is created. Replicas can be increased anytime. The Shrink Index API lets you reindex the index into a new index with fewer shards.
Shard splitting  You can use the Index Splitting API to index to a new index with primary shards split.
Relocate shards and replicas  can be done by creating a shard replicate on the desired node and then removing the shard from the source node  can move shards and replicas to any node in the cluster on demand
Control shard routing  shards or _route_ parameter  routing parameter
Pluggable shard/replica assignment  New Autoscaling API replaces the old rule-based replica assignment  Probabilistic shard balancing with Tempest plugin
Avoid duplicate indexing on replicas  Solr 7 provides 3 kinds of replica types: NRT (default and the pre-Solr 7 behavior), tlog and pull. Non-SolrCloud master-slave replication can be achieved with tlog replica types.
Consistency Indexing requests are synchronous with replication. A indexing request won't return until all replicas respond. No check for downed replicas. They will catch up when they recover. When new replicas are added, they won't start accepting and responding to requests until they are finished replicating the index. Replication between nodes is synchronous by default, thus ES is consistent by default, but it can be set to asynchronous on a per document indexing basis. Index writes can be configured to fail is there are not sufficient active shard replicas. The default is quorum, but all or one are also available.



Misc

Feature Solr 7.2.1 Elasticsearch 6.2.4
Web Admin interface  bundled with Solr  Marvel or Kibana apps
Visualisation Banana (Port of Kibana) Kibana
Hosting providers WebSolr, Searchify, Hosted-Solr, IndexDepot, OpenSolr, gotosolr Found, Scalefastr, ObjectRocket, bonsai.io, Indexisto, qbox.io, IndexDepot, Compose.io, Sematext Logsene

Sources

solr-vs-elasticsearch.com

Me contacter

fr.thomas.rossier@gmail.com