I've seen a lot of ES competitor posts pop up on HN lately, and I think they're missing the point of Elastic.
If you only need very basic word search, ES is probably not worth the complexity in your stack, especially if you're already running a SQL database with decent plaintext search.
Where elasticsearch shines is in complex queries: "Show me every match where this field contains 'extinction' within 10 words of 'impact crater' but NOT containing 'oceanic' and the publish date is > last month and one of the subjects is anthropology"
If you only need very basic word search, ES is probably not worth the complexity in your stack, especially if you're already running a SQL database with decent plaintext search.
Where elasticsearch shines is in complex queries: "Show me every match where this field contains 'extinction' within 10 words of 'impact crater' but NOT containing 'oceanic' and the publish date is > last month and one of the subjects is anthropology"