I've never really thought that elastic search is all that great, to be honest. I use it every day at work for an application that does a ton of aggregations.

That said, I can't shake the feeling that we could get the same level of performance with RethinkDb with the benefit of a better API and less overhead.

Assuming that the use case does not require large quantities of full-text search, is there really any reason to choose ElasticSearch over RethinkDb? ElasticSearch does have a larger ecosystem, but with how good RethinkDb's API is, I'm not entirely sure any 3rd party packages would actually be necessary.

Add to that RethinkDb's ability to do joins and changefeeds and this decision becomes a no-brainer for me.