We like that we can deploy our own clusters, that's very nice for us who are just getting started with this platform.The UI is not so easy to use at first sight but it gets better using some tutorials/videos. Also having your data in multiple locations makes sense from an infrastructure point of view (we have about 10 different DCs). If you want to try ElasticSearch I would say do it! You will enjoy all features. Especially if you need more power than Solr or Kibana could give you. Our main goal was finding good solutions for analytics, searching & machine learning problems related to video content analysis.