PostGIS VS Elasticsearch: Geo Distance Filtering/Sorting

PostGIS VS Elasticsearch

Azeem Chauhan | LinkedIn

---

I am writing this article to help developers to answer the following question:

Can we use PostGIS for Geo-Based queries and fully replace Elasticsearch ?

As we know, every tools has their own trade-offs but as a software developer it is our responsibility to find the right tool for our needs by considering the fiscal aspect, leveraging the organisation level available tools.

This article suggestion is purely based on our use case, and it may or may not be necessarily the best for your use-case so try to evaluate what resources you have, what you can leverage in your organisation.

To choose PostGIS as alternative to Elasticsearch, it should meet following expectations:

• Must have support of performant Geo-Spatial queries.

• Must be scalable and performant enough to support futures requirements as data grows.

• Must be equivalent to the Elasticsearch in term of Response time, Accuracy in results etc.