---
title: The Transactional Elasticsearch Alternative
---
ParadeDB is an open source, ACID-compliant alternative to Elasticsearch. ParadeDB is built on Postgres as a Postgres extension, not a fork of Postgres.
## Why ParadeDB?
There are many search engines in the world, but they are mostly built for static datasets and eventual consistency. ParadeDB is for users who
want first-class search and analytics performance, but frequently update data and need consistency between their source and their indexes.
ParadeDB may be a good fit for your stack if:
- **You frequently update** the data you want to run search queries over
- **Elasticsearch lag, shard loss, or stale indexes** keep you up at night
- You spend more time **babysitting ETL processes** than doing things that matter
- You **enjoy using Postgres**, you **hate using Elasticsearch**, or something in between
- **You have tried tsvector and the GIN index for Postgres text search**, but lack of fuzzy matching, BM25 relevance scoring, advanced query types, etc. leads to low-quality results
- Analytical queries in Postgres (e.g. `COUNT`, `GROUP BY`, etc.) **hit timeouts**
- You **value simplicity** when designing systems
## ParadeDB vs. Alternatives
People usually compare ParadeDB to two other types of systems: OLTP databases like vanilla Postgres and search engines like Elastic.
| | **OLTP database** | **Search engine** | **ParadeDB** |
| --------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| **Primary role** | System of record | Search and retrieval engine | System of record **and** search/analytics engine |
| **Examples** | Postgres, MySQL | Elasticsearch, OpenSearch | |
| **ACID guarantees** | Full ACID compliance, read-after-write guarantees | No transactions, atomic only per-document, eventual consistency, durability not guaranteed until flush | Full ACID compliance, read-after-write guarantees |
| **Update & delete support** | Built for fast-changing data | Struggles with updates/deletes | Built for fast-changing data |
| **Search features** | Basic FTS (no BM25, weak ranking) | Rich search features (BM25, fuzzy matching, faceting, hybrid search) | Rich search features (BM25, fuzzy matching, faceting, hybrid search) |
| **Analytics features** | Not an analytical DB (no column store, batch processing, etc.) | Column store, batch processing, parallelization via sharding | Column store, batch processing, parallelization via Postgres [parallel workers](/documentation/configuration/write_throughput) |
| **Lag** | None in a single cluster | At least network, ETL transformation, and indexing time | None in a single cluster |
| **Operational complexity** | Simple (single datastore) | Complex (ETL pipelines, managing multiple systems) | Simple (single datastore) |
| **Scalability** | Vertical scaling in a single node, horizontal scaling through Kubernetes | Horizontal scaling through sharding | Vertical scaling in a single node, horizontal scaling through [Kubernetes](/deploy/self-hosted/kubernetes) |
| **Language** | SQL | Custom DSL | Standard SQL with custom search operators |
## Production Readiness
As a company, ParadeDB is over two years old. ParadeDB launched in the [Y Combinator (YC)](https://ycombinator.com) S23 batch and has been validated in
production since December 2023.
[ParadeDB Community](https://github.com/paradedb/paradedb), the open-source version of ParadeDB, has been deployed over 100,000 times in the past 12 months.
ParadeDB Enterprise, the durable and production-hardened edition
of ParadeDB, powers core search and analytics use cases at enterprises ranging from Fortune 500s to fast-growing startups. A few
examples include:
- **Alibaba**, the largest Asia-Pacific cloud provider, uses ParadeDB to power search inside their data warehouse. [Case study available](https://paradedb.com/blog/case_study_alibaba).
- **Bilt Rewards**1, a rent payments technology company that processed over $36B in payments in 2024.
- **Modern Treasury**1, a financial technology company that automates the full cycle of money movement.
- **UnifyGTM**1, one of the fastest-growing startups in AI sales automation.
- **TCDI**1, a giant in the legal software and litigation management space.
_1. Case study coming soon_
## Next Steps
You're now ready to jump into our guides.
Get started with ParadeDB in under five minutes.
Learn how ParadeDB is built.
API reference for full text search and analytics.
Deploy ParadeDB as a Postgres extension or standalone database.