When comparing Bonsai vs AWS Elasticsearch, the Slant community recommends Bonsai for most people. In the question“What are the best hosted Elasticsearch services?” Bonsai is ranked 2nd while AWS Elasticsearch is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose Bonsai is:
Bonsai shared cluster plans are created instantly and charges are prorated to usage, for easy and elastic development and testing clusters.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Instant cluster provisioning
Bonsai shared cluster plans are created instantly and charges are prorated to usage, for easy and elastic development and testing clusters.
Pro Heroku Support
The first Heroku addon provider for Elasticsearch, with good pricing and support for a wide range of development and production cluster types.
Pro High performance SSD based infrastructure
All Elasticsearch databases run on high performance Solid State Drives (SSD).
Pro Multi-node clusters by default
All clusters run on at least three nodes (Elasticsearch best practice) for data replication and redundancy.
Pro Free developer plans available
Pro High availability and uptime
Transparent and reports its uptime here.
Pro High level of Lucene expertise
The team also runs Solr as a service (Websolr - the first hosted Solr service) and has a high level of experience and expertise running search as a service.
Pro Knowledgeable support team
Experienced developers and engineers answer email support questions thoroughly.
Pro Most experienced provider
Bonsai was the first to offer hosted Elasticsearch as a service.
Pro Only small markup from raw instance costs
The mark up is only about 130% of the raw instance cost. This makes is one of the cheapest ES hosting options.
Pro Easy to setup
Integrates nicely with AWS ecosystem. Basically One-click setup of ES clusters.
Pro It is a part of your AWS bill
Very simple to add it if your organization is already charged from AWS.
Cons
Con They do not support old versions without a 5x price increase
Instead of deciding to drop support for their older versions and cutting people off with an 'end-of-life', Bonsai offers continued support for clients who are unable or unwilling to switch to the latest version. This, however comes at an increased price.
Con Limited Elasticsearch API on shared plans
Bonsai shared cluster plans take an opinionated approach to multitenancy. They limit user access to some of the low-level administration-oriented APIs for security and stability reasons.
Con No node stats on shared plans
Since users on shared plans have to share the node with other tenants, the stats on the _node/stats
endpoint would not be very useful for the single tenant since the reports there are for the whole node.
Con Monitoring is not good
The dashboards that you get with AWS's ES are not very useful and there's no way to add additional monitoring dashboards.
Con You are at your own
Deploy is simple, after you at your own.
Con Difficult or impossible to configure many options
There is no way to change most of the configs in your ES cluster.