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Apache Pinot vs. Elastic for Real-Time Analytics

Engineering teams at leading tech companies are moving log and analytics workloads from Elasticsearch to real-time analytics systems like Apache Pinot. StarTree helps them succeed.

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Why choose Apache Pinot over ElasticSearch?

At StarTree, we work with world class engineering teams who are building some of the most sophisticated data-intensive systems. Many of them have been using Elasticsearch — a proven tool for search and log indexing — to handle query intensive use cases. But as data under management grows, and requirements expand, they run into difficulties when they try to use it for fast, or high concurrency aggregations and analytics. That’s when they start looking at purpose-built real-time OLAP systems like Apache Pinot.

High concurrency (QPS)

Unlock your data for internal & external users by supporting extremely high query per second (100,000+ QPS)

Low-Latency Aggregations at Scale

Maintain performant aggregations against petabytes of data, with latencies measured in milliseconds.

Fast & Flexible Indexing

Leverage multiple indexing options, including the star-tree index for fast and efficient query results

Support for Upserts

Query data within milliseconds of ingestion to ensure results are accurate and up to date.

Reduced costs

Pinot enables users to save significantly on infrastructure spend with more efficient memory and column storage.

Better Tiered Storage Solution

Get results in seconds, not minutes with tiered storage designed for fast analytics. Query data within milliseconds of ingestion to ensure results are accurate and up to date.

Uber fully replaced Elasticsearch with Apache Pinot for its time-sensitive real-time analytics. By migrating, they saved more than $2M on infrastructure costs per year and reduced their overall data size by 120TB. The team also saw a 50% reduction in database cores and reduced page load time from 14 seconds to less than 5 seconds. With Apache Pinot, Uber can do real-time upserts and get query results from 1.5PB of data with <100ms P99 latencies.

More comparisons from the field

Companies like Uber, Cisco WebEx, and Uniqode have made the transition from Elasticsearch to Apache Pinot. The results are always impressive: faster queries, simpler pipelines, improved reliability, and dramatically lower infrastructure costs.

Cisco

5x-150x lower latency with Pinot

Uniqode

10x-20x faster with Pinot

BurdaForward

5-10ms query SLA with Pinot

A database ideal for real-time analytics – at speed and scale.

Apache Pinot is a real-time OLAP database built for ultra-fast analytics on high-volume data. It supports sub-second queries on billions of rows, even with high cardinality and concurrency — ideal for working with telemetry, logs, streaming business data and more.

StarTree Cloud delivers a fully managed Pinot experience with enterprise-grade security, automated scaling, and seamless integrations (Kafka, Flink, BI tools, etc.). It gives your team the power to build real-time dashboards, alerts, and APIs on live data — without compromising performance or reliability.

If you’re tracking fast-moving data and need millisecond-level insights at scale, Pinot + StarTree can help you move faster and operate smarter.