Elasticsearch vs Vespa Performance Comparison

A detailed performance comparison report between Vespa and Elasticsearch highlights Vespa's superior query efficiency, scalability, and operational cost-effectiveness for e-commerce search applications. Using a dataset of 1 million products, the benchmark evaluates both write and query performance across lexical, vector, and hybrid search strategies, ensuring fairness by configuring all queries to return equivalent results. Vespa demonstrates significant advantages, with throughput per CPU core being 8.5x higher for hybrid queries, up to 12.9x higher for vector searches, and 6.5x better for lexical searches, alongside being 4x more efficient for in-place updates. While Elasticsearch excels during initial write phases, Vespa outperforms in steady-state operations, leading to reduced infrastructure costs by up to 5x. Testimonials from organizations like Vinted, which successfully migrated from Elasticsearch to Vespa, emphasize improvements in search consistency, latency, and scalability, suggesting Vespa as a robust choice for modern e-commerce search solutions.