DB-EnginesextremeDB - Data management wherever you need itEnglish
Deutsch
Knowledge Base of Relational and NoSQL Database Management Systemsprovided by Redgate Software

DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite

Please select another system to include it in the comparison.

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines
NameElasticsearch  Xexclude from comparisonSphinx  Xexclude from comparisonSQLite  Xexclude from comparison
DescriptionA distributed, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene infoElasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metricOpen source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databasesWidely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS
Primary database modelSearch engine
Vector DBMS
Search engineRelational DBMS
Secondary database modelsDocument store
Spatial DBMS
DB-Engines Ranking infomeasures the popularity of database management systemsranking trend
Trend Chart
Score128.08
Rank#8  Overall
#1  Search engines
#1  Vector DBMS
Score5.79
Rank#56  Overall
#5  Search engines
Score114.09
Rank#10  Overall
#7  Relational DBMS
Websitewww.elastic.co/­elasticsearchsphinxsearch.comwww.sqlite.org
Technical documentationwww.elastic.co/­guide/­en/­elasticsearch/­reference/­current/­index.htmlsphinxsearch.com/­docswww.sqlite.org/­docs.html
DeveloperElasticSphinx Technologies Inc.Dwayne Richard Hipp
Initial release201020012000
Current release8.6, January 20233.5.1, February 20233.46.1  (13 August 2024), August 2024
License infoCommercial or Open SourceOpen Source infoElastic LicenseOpen Source infoGPL version 2, commercial licence availableOpen Source infoPublic Domain
Cloud-based only infoOnly available as a cloud servicenonono
DBaaS offerings (sponsored links) infoDatabase as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.
Implementation languageJavaC++C
Server operating systemsAll OS with a Java VMFreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows
server-less
Data schemeschema-free infoFlexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistentyesyes infodynamic column types
Typing infopredefined data types such as float or dateyesnoyes infonot rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.
XML support infoSome form of processing data in XML format, e.g. support for XML data structures, and/or support for XPath, XQuery or XSLT.nono
Secondary indexesyes infoAll search fields are automatically indexedyes infofull-text index on all search fieldsyes
SQL infoSupport of SQLSQL-like query languageSQL-like query language (SphinxQL)yes infoSQL-92 is not fully supported
APIs and other access methodsJava API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API
Proprietary protocolADO.NET infoinofficial driver
JDBC infoinofficial driver
ODBC infoinofficial driver
Supported programming languages.Net
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
C++ infounofficial client library
Java
Perl infounofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby infounofficial client library
Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl
Server-side scripts infoStored proceduresyesnono
Triggersyes infoby using the 'percolation' featurenoyes
Partitioning methods infoMethods for storing different data on different nodesShardingSharding infoPartitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supportednone
Replication methods infoMethods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodesyesnonenone
MapReduce infoOffers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methodsES-Hadoop Connectornono
Consistency concepts infoMethods to ensure consistency in a distributed systemEventual Consistency infoSynchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all
Foreign keys infoReferential integritynonoyes
Transaction concepts infoSupport to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of datanonoACID
Concurrency infoSupport for concurrent manipulation of datayesyesyes infovia file-system locks
Durability infoSupport for making data persistentyesyes infoThe original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.yes
In-memory capabilities infoIs there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.Memcached and Redis integrationyes
User concepts infoAccess controlnono

More information provided by the system vendor

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.

Related products and services

We invite representatives of vendors of related products to contact us for presenting information about their offerings here.

More resources
ElasticsearchSphinxSQLite
DB-Engines blog posts

PostgreSQL is the DBMS of the Year 2017
2 January 2018, Paul Andlinger, Matthias Gelbmann

Elasticsearch moved into the top 10 most popular database management systems
3 July 2017, Matthias Gelbmann

MySQL, PostgreSQL and Redis are the winners of the March ranking
2 March 2016, Paul Andlinger

show all

The DB-Engines ranking includes now search engines
4 February 2013, Paul Andlinger

show all

Big gains for Relational Database Management Systems in DB-Engines Ranking
2 February 2016, Matthias Gelbmann

show all

Recent citations in the news

Elastic Delivers Performance Gains for Users Running Elasticsearch on Google Axion Processors
10 April 2025, Business Wire

Amazon OpenSearch Service announces Standard and Extended Support dates for Elasticsearch and OpenSearch versions
7 November 2024, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Elasticsearch will be open source again as CTO declares changed landscape
2 September 2024, devclass

Elasticsearch Was Great, But Vector Databases Are the Future
18 November 2024, The New Stack

Quesma bridges Elasticsearch and SQL, promises faster, cheaper queries
4 April 2025, Blocks and Files

provided by Google News

Manticore is on search for new investment and partners
9 December 2024, Blocks and Files

Brainiacs Episode 13: Sphinx Formations, Fake News, and “The Mom Penalty”
23 February 2024, NYU

Switching From Sphinx to MkDocs Documentation – What Did I Gain and Lose
2 February 2024, Towards Data Science

Create a Full Autocomplete Search Application with Elasticsearch, Kibana, NestJS and React
14 September 2022, HackerNoon

Voice Recognition Tools Review. Alexa, PocketSphinx, Google API or Project Oxford?
1 March 2024, Netguru

provided by Google News

Zero-latency SQLite storage in every Durable Object
26 September 2024, The Cloudflare Blog

A Coding Guide to Build an Agentic AI‑Powered Asynchronous Ticketing Assistant Using PydanticAI Agents, Pydantic v2, and SQLite Database
22 April 2025, MarkTechPost

SQLite re-implemented in Rust to achieve asynchronous I/O and other changes
12 December 2024, devclass

Google’s AI Tool Big Sleep Finds Zero-Day Vulnerability in SQLite Database Engine
4 November 2024, The Hacker News

How to install SQLite on Windows
20 October 2024, theserverside.com

provided by Google News



Share this page

Featured Products

Datastax Astra logo

Bring all your data to Generative AI applications with vector search enabled by the most scalable
vector database available.
Try for Free

Neo4j logo

See for yourself how a graph database can make your life easier.
Use Neo4j online for free.

RaimaDB logo

RaimaDB, embedded database for mission-critical applications. When performance, footprint and reliability matters.
Try RaimaDB for free.

SingleStore logo

The data platform to build your intelligent applications.
Try it free.

Milvus logo

Vector database designed for GenAI, fully equipped for enterprise implementation.
Try Managed Milvus for Free

Present your product here