Elastic named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide General-Purpose Knowledge Discovery 2025 Vendor Assessment

November 12, 2025

Elastic has been named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide General-Purpose Knowledge Discovery 2025 Vendor Assessment (doc #US53011225, November 2025). We believe this recognition highlights Elastic’s continued innovation in combining search, analytics, and AI within a single platform designed to power the next generation of knowledge discovery experiences from enterprise, ecommerce, and multimodal search to agentic AI.

The platform for unstructured data and knowledge discovery

Elastic enables enterprises to ingest, search, analyze, and act on data in any form — structured, semi-structured, or unstructured — including text, vector, image, and other multimodal data types. It remains one of the industry’s leading platforms for unstructured data and AI-powered discovery.

At its core is Elasticsearch, the AI-native platform for context engineering that:

Integrates seamlessly with large language models (LLMs) from OpenAI and others
Supports bring-your-own-model (BYOM) flexibility
Now includes native inference capabilities for building generative AI experiences grounded in enterprise context

Elastic’s AI-native architecture makes it uniquely suited for modern knowledge discovery, powering conversational search, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and AI agent workflows that connect content, context, and creativity across the enterprise.

Why we believe Elastic was recognized

We believe the IDC MarketScape recognized Elastic for its open, unified, and AI-native platform that empowers organizations to discover and operationalize knowledge across all data types without vendor lock-in.

We see the following as key differentiators for Elastic:

Proven business impact: Enterprises, such as Docusign, NHS, and Comcast, rely on Elastic to drive measurable outcomes from 99% faster incident resolution to intelligent document management and multimodal search at scale.
Leadership in relevance: Elastic’s hybrid, semantic, and reranking models ensure that AI systems are grounded in the most relevant, accurate context — a concept Elastic has pioneered for more than a decade.
Developer-empowered innovation: Elastic’s open APIs, Elasticsearch Query Language (ES|QL), and intelligent tools like Semantic_Text give organizations the flexibility to adapt search and AI experiences to their unique needs. Developers can innovate rapidly while business teams benefit from intuitive, natural-language exploration and faster time-to-value, turning data into insights that drive measurable outcomes.
Innovation ecosystem: With 5.5 billion downloads and a large open source community built around our open source products, Elastic continues to empower developers and enterprises alike to build AI-native, search-powered applications.
Visionary strategy and ecosystem partnerships: Elastic’s leadership reflects not only its technology innovation but also its strategic partnerships and open ecosystem approach. By integrating seamlessly with first- and third-party LLMs, major cloud providers, and enterprise systems, Elastic enables customers to future-proof their AI and search investments while maintaining flexibility and control.
Unified data platform: Elastic brings together search, observability, and security within a single data platform, helping organizations eliminate silos, reduce cost, and achieve faster time to insight.
Driving innovation through Elasticsearch Labs: Elasticsearch Labs bridges experimentation and execution, offering early access to cutting-edge capabilities like generative AI, embedding models, and reranking. It gives developers the tools and guidance to transform ideas into production-ready, AI-powered search experiences.

AI-native innovation and momentum

Building on the strong foundation that we believe established Elastic as a Leader, we’ve accelerated innovation to further cement that leadership in AI-powered search and analytics. Over the past year, Elastic has advanced its AI roadmap to help customers move from search to execution, turning data into intelligent, actionable insights. Key milestones include:

Elastic Agent Builder: Agent Builder offers a complete set of capabilities for creating and deploying AI agents that act on real-time enterprise data.
Elastic Inference Service (EIS): EIS natively provides inference-as-a-service and provides embedding, reranking, and large and small language models as a service at scale.
Acquisition of Jina AI: By acquiring Jina AI, Elastic gains a premier team and portfolio of machine learning innovations in multimodal and multilingual search. Jina’s leading research and technology accelerate Elastic’s AI roadmap, advancing retrieval across text, image, and audio while strengthening our position at the forefront of open, AI-native search.
Recognition in the 2025 Forrester Wave™ for Cognitive Search: Elastic was also named a Leader in the Forrester Wave™: Cognitive Search, Q4 2025, underscoring its industry leadership in AI-driven discovery.

Together, these advancements underscore Elastic’s mission to help every organization unlock the full potential of their data through AI-driven relevance safely, securely, and at scale.

We believe being recognized as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape for Knowledge Discovery underscores the power of Elastic’s open, AI-native platform. Our mission is to help every organization unlock the full potential of their data, connecting content, context, and creativity through search and generative AI. With innovations like Agent Builder, Elastic Inference Service, and through our recent acquisition of Jina AI, we’re redefining what’s possible in enterprise knowledge discovery.

Steve Kearns, General Manager, Elasticsearch

Read the excerpt

For more information, read our IDC MarketScape General-Purpose Knowledge Discovery 2025 Vendor Assessment excerpt, and start your Elastic Cloud free trial.

IDC MarketScape vendor analysis model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of technology and suppliers in a given market. The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each supplier’s position within a given market. The Capabilities score measures supplier product, go-to-market and business execution in the short-term. The Strategy score measures alignment of supplier strategies with customer requirements in a 3-5-year timeframe. Supplier market share is represented by the size of the icons.

The release and timing of any features or functionality described in this post remain at Elastic's sole discretion. Any features or functionality not currently available may not be delivered on time or at all.

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