Case Study: Compare Group achieves faster, more flexible product search across 30 million offers with Elastic

Elasticsearch Stands Up to Comparison at Compare Group

Compare Group (Utrecht, The Netherlands) runs five online price‑comparison portals that help hundreds of thousands of shoppers compare products and prices across some 30 million offers. Faced with rapidly growing, fragmented data (around 100 GB / tens of millions of records), a home‑grown Lucene solution became hard to configure and scale—slowing searches, complicating category matching and limiting the company’s move to a mobile‑first architecture.

Compare Group replaced the legacy stack with Elasticsearch (plus Logstash and Kibana), using a MySQL/MongoDB + microservices pipeline and a single, incrementally updated index per portal. The change delivered much faster front‑end searches and twice‑faster back‑end processes, reduced development time and near‑zero downtime, lowered hardware load through incremental indexing, and gave marketing and ops real‑time analytics for quick responses (e.g., spotting demand spikes).

Compare Group

Maarten Janssen

Chief Technical Officer