Elasticsearch vs Vespa Performance Comparison | Vespa Blog
We recently benchmarked Elasticsearch and Vespa and wrote a very detailed 84-page report that aims to be clear and educational. There, we go beyond the benchmark results: we start by showing how we see fair and comprehensive benchmarking. Then we add details about the architectures of both Elasticsearch and Vespa. Finally, after the results, you’ll see how you can reproduce the benchmark on your own hardware.
Below, you will find the executive summary of the technical report and its table of contents. You can download the full report here. Enjoy!
This report presents a reproducible and comprehensive performance comparison between Vespa (8.427.7) and Elasticsearch (8.15.2) for an e-commerce search application using a dataset of 1 million products. The benchmark evaluates both write operations (document ingestion and updates) and query performance across different search strategies: lexical matching, vector similarity, and hybrid approaches. All query types are configured to return equivalent results, ensuring a fair, apples-to-apples comparison.
Vespa demonstrates significant query performance, scalability, and update efficiency advantages. The illustration shows queries per second per CPU core for different query types and reveals Vespa’s significant query efficiency advantages:
