elastic isn’t competing with algolia, imo. elastic is after the enterprise customers who have a mission-critical need for search (rather than a casual need like algolia users)
but I think mission-critical search is a niche technical problem that isn’t applicable to many enterprises.
Elastic is not even after the search market, but the analytics/loggin/reporting sector. Of course, they are after every customer, but one Elastic rep told me that 75% of customers are not using Elasticsearch for traditional search.
Correct. Elastic competes more with Splunk or Sumologic than it does with Algolia or open-source Lucene/Solr. It's nominally a traditional ecommerce/enterprise search engine as well, but it's not terribly good at it.
Then they are in huge trouble because Kibana is hot garbage. Nearly zero of the user experience goodness from Kibana3 has survived the Elastic aqui-hire.
If they plan to compete with Splunk they need do some serious rework of Kibana. Even something relatively new like Humio is must easier to work with than Kibana.
Entire ELK stack was always pretty bad, compared to Splunk or a syslog server and grep, in my opinion.
We tried to buy a support contract from Elastic years back, but the pricing model put all useful levels of support way beyond our reach. Apparently they didn't understand that we had to make our money and didn't have VC funding.