What is the difference between Elastic Path & Elasticsearch?

We get this question often. While similar names can be confusing, Elastic Path and Elasticsearch (now known as Elastic) are entirely separate companies that each offer different types of best-in-class products. This post will summarize the differences between the two companies.

What is Elastic Path?

We provide composable, API-first headless commerce solutions that make it simple for brands with complex requirements to deliver unique digital commerce experiences. Our offering is made up of three main components: two core commerce platforms, the Composable Commerce Hub, and Composable Commerce XA™.

Depending on your needs, we offer two commerce platforms, Elastic Path Commerce offers self-hosted headless commerce purpose-built for telecommunications, utilities, and regulated goods industries where brands require total control of your data, and infrastructure is paramount.

Elastic Path Commerce Cloud enables brands to build experiences fast, with a modern, headless, SaaS, API-first, & microservices-based commerce platform.

The Composable Commerce Hub contains commerce solutions for digitally-driven brands who want to create complete commerce experiences seamlessly. In addition to the Accelerators available for individual services, we also offer Pre-Composed Solutions™.

These are business-ready solutions pre-composed with Elastic Path commerce capabilities, third-party integrations, and customizations. You can be up and running with a ‘best-for-me’ composed solution in a matter of weeks, not months. See all our Pre-composed Solutions™ here.

Composable Commerce XA™ is the industry’s first and only offering to de-risk a Composable Commerce approach. Many brands struggle with the complexity of managing numerous technologies that make up a complete solution.

Composable Commerce XA™ eliminates that risk by providing operational assurance, so if an issue arises from any service that makes up a multi-vendor solution, you have one central contact – Elastic Path. Learn more here.

The essence of a composable approach is the ability to pick and choose the best vendors for your brand’s unique and complex needs by selecting the vendors for solutions like OMS, catalog management, and search that deliver the best experience possible for your customers across touchpoint and geographies.

What is Elasticsearch?

It is one of those leading services specializing in solving a specific problem, search. Elasticsearch is a distributed, open search and analytics engine for all data types. Crucial to any search solution, speed and scalability are a few of their stand-out selling points.

Like other services that can be composed into a complete eCommerce solution, Elasticsearch is only one piece of their entire offering, Elastic Stack. Elastic Stack combines Elasticsearch with Logstash (data processing pipeline) & Kibana (data visualization) to provide open and free tools for data ingestion, enrichment, storage, analysis, and visualization.

As with many vendors that make up pieces of a composed solution in a headless eCommerce solution, how well one vendor fits your particular use case will depend on what drives value in your business. For example, if you need to visualize indexed data from several sources, the Elastic Stack is a great fit. To learn more about Elastic, check them out on our hub here.

Need to learn more about Composable Architecture?

Discover more about the latest approach to ecommerce, it's benefits, and whether or not Composable Commerce is right for your business in our comprehensive guide.

Are There Other Search Solutions?

Your brand may need to solve a different problem. For example, if you need an AI-powered search or recommendations to deliver brilliant customer experiences on your web store, Algolia is a leader in the search space. You can learn more about Algolia and how it can help your brand deliver results with consistent experiences across touchpoints here.

The beauty of an API-first composable approach to eCommerce is that you have the control to pick the service that works best for you.

Sticking with search, Coveo is another of our leading partners that enable quick, powerful personalization to deliver a seamless buying experience for your customers. Learn more about how Coveo can learn from data points across channels to build recommendations that help your customers find what they need and your brand reach its goals here.

Search is one of the critical components in a modern composable architecture. If you are looking to move to a modern compostable commerce architecture to benefit from the speed, control, and simplicity that it offers, check out our guide to compassable commerce here.