Elasticsearch is powerful — and a part-time job. AsterSearch gives you the parts that matter (BM25, vectors, aggregations, ILM, log search) on a single Rust binary, with multi-tenancy and Stripe metering already wired. No JVM tuning. No shard math. No 3 a.m. cluster pages.
We don't claim feature-by-feature parity with a 14-year-old product. We claim parity on the workloads that actually keep teams on ES — and we're explicit about the rest.
| Capability | Elasticsearch | AsterSearch |
|---|---|---|
| BM25 full-text search | Tantivy 0.22 | |
| Vector search (HNSW) | Lucene 9.x | USearch + int8/int4 quantization |
| Hybrid retrieval (BM25 + vector + RRF) | Manual RRF | Built-in, single query |
| Aggregations (date_histogram, range, stats, cardinality, percentiles) | Q4 ship — five core aggs | |
| Index Lifecycle Management (rollover, freeze, delete) | Q4 — hot/warm/cold tiers | |
| Function score (decay, filter_weight, modifiers) | Full composition matrix | |
Kibana-compatible _search DSL subset | Q4 — Grafana datasource works | |
| OTLP-native log ingest | OTel collector glue | Native via log-search-cell |
| Cross-cluster search | Post-v1 (Q1 2027) | |
| Painless / scripted scoring | Deliberately omitted | |
| ML data frames / anomaly detection | Post-v1 | |
| Parent / child | Nested only | |
| Self-hostable | Heavy ops | Single binary |
| BYOC (Helm into your VPC) | Elastic Cloud only | Q4 ship — control plane stays SaaS |
For application-search and log-search workloads under ~10TB, ES forces you to pay for features you don't use and capacity you don't need.
Rust binary, predictable RSS. No "increase your heap" runbook, no GC pauses, no 50% memory overhead.
NVMe hot · HDD warm · S3 cold, driven by age and access. Synthetic-workload cost drops ≥ 30% vs hot-only.
Tenants share infra without index-per-tenant explosion. ES forces a cluster-per-noisy-neighbor.
We have a playbook for both. The ES log migration uses OTLP ingest at the collector level, an ILM policy that mirrors yours, and the Kibana DSL subset so existing Grafana dashboards keep rendering.