Abstract The goal of this work was to benchmark the performance of Apache Lucene and Elasticsearch for real time API search application. The research compares the speed of indexing, query latency and resource consumption using secondary qualitative and quantitative data. Lucene has well and truly shown how well it can index content from a raw indexing perspective, but Elasticsearch offers the kind of scalability expected for a distributed cloud endeavour along with a superior API integration. Industry adoption trends are analysed in the case studies. Accordingly, the study suggests the use of controlled benchmarking tools and evaluation of project specific needs beforehand in choosing the most appropriate search engine for improving performance in real time, high demand environments. Keywords: Apache Lucene, Elasticsearch, real-time search, API performance, indexing speed