For many years, Solr was the only realistic choice for most customers wanting to do an enterprise search project based on open source. Things changed around 2010/2011 when Elasticsearch started to gain traction. The last few years, the community around Elasticsearch has been growing rapidly and the software is regularly downloaded approximately half a million times each month.

While both platforms are based on Lucene, Elasticsearch has been built for scaling from day one, while it is often said Solr added this as an afterthought. Developers also generally find it very easy to interact with since it uses a JSON-based API model. Much could be said about the differences between the two platforms, but without going into a long list of technical details, Elasticsearch felt like a breath of fresh air when we first laid eyes on it a few years ago.

Elasticsearch or Solr? Google trends will give you a nice input to the dilemma.

Today the company behind the product, announced they have raised a whopping 70M USD in funding, bringing the total up to over 100M USD in the last 18 months!

For everyone loving the product, and everyone considering what platform to go with for their enterprise search needs, this is excellent news! Even though it is an open source product, and everyone in theory can submit suggested changes, bugfixes etc – there’s definite value in having a group of full time, dedicated developers building the product.

This means the product and the ecosystem around it will continue to evolve, improve and increase for a long time with considerable force.

So – for all those wondering what horse to put their bets on for future open source development;  Picking the fastest running horse is often better than picking the horse that’s been around the longest.

Comperio is an official partner with Elasticsearch.

Please join us at our breakfast seminar in Oslo in a few days (June 11). Elasticsearch will be there to present alongside Microsoft and Google.