Postgres Built-In Full-Text Search Can Replace Elasticsearch for Most Apps

A technical guide published on DEV Community argues that most applications running on PostgreSQL do not need a dedicated search engine like Elasticsearch. Postgres has offered built-in full-text search for over a decade, supporting stemming, ranking, and GIN indexes that keep queries performant for tables with fewer than a few million rows. The article explains how tsvector and tsquery enable linguistic matching rather than simple substring matching, making it more accurate than LIKE queries. Using generated columns and GIN indexes introduced in Postgres 12, developers can set up self-maintaining, indexed search with just two database statements. The author cautions that teams often adopt Elasticsearch prematurely, inheriting a second data store to sync, secure, and fund when Postgres would have been sufficient.