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Add to SafariWhen comparing Bonsai vs Elastic Cloud, the Slant community recommends Elastic Cloud for most people. In the question“What are the best hosted Elasticsearch services?” Elastic Cloud is ranked 1st while Bonsai is ranked 2nd. The most important reason people chose Elastic Cloud is:
Rather than pricing by number of documents or API calls, they price by instance size. So if you have a lot of documents (>100k) that are very small (50MB), or a large number of shards which are small, you won't be arbitrarily forced into a higher pricing tier. Same deal with number of requests - if you need more memory on your instance, then upgrade. If you have a lot of very fast requests, you can stay on a lower tier.
Question 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 Scalable
Rather than pricing by number of documents or API calls, they price by instance size. So if you have a lot of documents (>100k) that are very small (50MB), or a large number of shards which are small, you won't be arbitrarily forced into a higher pricing tier. Same deal with number of requests - if you need more memory on your instance, then upgrade. If you have a lot of very fast requests, you can stay on a lower tier.
Pro All Elasticsearch features are supported
Pro New versions are available same day as released
Pro Extremely stable
This is the official version of hosted ElasticSearch and it's backed by the ElasticSearch developers. This makes it probably the best in terms of stability as far as services that use ElasticSearch as a backend go.
Pro Comes with Shield (security), Watcher (alerting) and Marvel (monitoring)
Pro Allow uploading custom plugins
Pro Includes S3 bucket for snapshot and restore (Automatic Backup every 30 minutes)
Pro Free trial available
There's a 14 days-long trial available without any credit card required.
Pro Dedicated clusters with reserved memory and storage
Clusters aren't shared, customers get their own dedicated cluster. Memory and storage is reserved - there's no upper limit in terms of indexes or documents to be stored - and Linux containers are used (LXC) for and process and resource isolation, which means you get the memory you are paying for without having to compete for it with other customers.
Pro Great support
Supported by the Elasticsearch developers themselves, although they won't respond for days.
Pro Easy to work with
Elasticsearch gained its popularity amongst developers by being enjoyable to use. A simple feature comparison against it's competition doesn't convey the significant advantages of just how easy it is to work with. This is due to multiple design choices such as the use of JSON for the API and queries.
Pro Allows multiple types of documents per index
Another useful and unique feature to Elasticsearch is the ability to have multiple types of documents in a single index. You can then facet, query or filter against all document types or a single type.
Pro Supports cjk plugins
Pro Includes x-pack
Xpack is plug-in for elastic search and Kibana. It provides features for securing and monitoring your elastic search instance.
https://www.elastic.co/products/x-pack
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 Support not satisfactory
Although this is provided by the creators of elastic search, the support is not as effective. It seems they only want you to buy the Gold / Platinum package for support.
Even though you clearly give proof to the support personnel that there is something wrong with the provisioning of the cluster do not be surprised if you get a mail back saying "Everything looks fine...blah blah ...consider taking gold/platinum support...blah blah."
Con Constant sales pitch for their platinum support, even during outage
Con Expensive
Typically 0.5-3x the cost of other providers.
