Elasticsearch vs Solr: The Best Search Engine for 2022

Before we get into the details of which search engine might be right for your app or website in 2022, let's define what Solr is and how Elasticsearch works.

We start with Solr, an open-source search platform that is integrated with Lucene, a Java library. Solr already has more than a decade in the industry, which makes it one of the search engines with the largest presence on the web.

Among its characteristics, the following stand out:

• Full-text search
• Multiple Array Search
• Real-time indexing
• dynamic grouping
• Database integration
• NoSQL functionality and productive handling of documents (eg Word and PDF files)

On the other side, Elasticsearch is an open-source RESTful engine. It can provide a distributed full-text search engine, as well as official client libraries available for Java, Groovy, PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python, .Net, and JavaScript.

Among its main characteristics, the following stand out:

• It has a distributed search
• You have a Multiple Lease Period
• Has the ability to perform a scan search
• Group aggregation

Key differences between Solr and Elasticsearch

Maturity

Despite being second to market, launched in 2004 on the CNET network, Solr has a longer history having contributed to Apache in 2006. Elasticsearch first appeared in 2001, created by its founder Shaw Bannon with Compass name.

Community of both search engines

The Solr and Elasticsearch communities are quite active, both being open-source projects. Solr is open source: anyone can help and contribute. It can also be added to Elasticsearch, but it is up to flexible Elasticsearch employees or companies to accept the same.

Installation and configuration

Elasticsearch stands out in this feature for its ease of installation and for being very light. At 26.1MB in size, it's less than half the size of the Solr installation package, which is about 150MB in size.

Generally speaking, if you are working with an application that uses JSON it is better to use Elasticsearch. Otherwise, use Solr as the schema.xml and solrconfig.xml are well documented.

At the end of the day, the search engine you choose for your application or website, be it Solr or Elasticsearch, will depend on the development needs that you have at the moment, so you must inform yourself correctly before making that decision.

At Rootstack we have managed to use both search engines to integrate them into the applications we make for our clients. If you think you have the talent to use Elasticsearch or Solr, click here and take the first step to a bright future with one of the strongest technology companies in Latin America.

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