OpenSearchvs
Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch: The project OpenSearch forked from, now under a different licence and developing separately
OpenSearch
Open-source search and analytics suite forked from Elasticsearch
As of 29 August 2026, OpenSearch is free to use. The Apache-licensed fork of Elasticsearch, created after its licence change and now under the Linux Foundation. Softwr lists it under Databases. OpenSearch is made by Linux Foundation, available on Linux, Self-hosted.
Overview
What OpenSearch does
OpenSearch is a search and analytics suite forked from Elasticsearch 7.10 by AWS in 2021, after Elastic moved Elasticsearch off the Apache 2.0 licence. It includes the search engine and OpenSearch Dashboards, the fork of Kibana. It moved to Linux Foundation stewardship in 2024. Functionally it covers the same ground: full-text search, log analytics, observability data and vector search. The reason to choose it is licensing and governance — Apache 2.0 under a neutral foundation — rather than a feature advantage over Elasticsearch, which has continued developing independently.
What people use it for
- Log and observability storage where an Apache-2.0 licence is a requirement
- Replacing Elasticsearch after the licence change without changing architecture
- Search plus analytics on one cluster rather than two systems
Related searches
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about OpenSearch.
- Diverged from Elasticsearch since 7.10, so clients, plugins and features no longer map one to one
- Operationally heavy in the way Elasticsearch is: cluster sizing, shard strategy and JVM tuning are ongoing work
- Smaller ecosystem of third-party tooling than Elasticsearch, which most integrations still target first
- Overkill for plain application search, where a dedicated search engine is far simpler
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of OpenSearch
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- OpenSearchvsMeilisearch
Meilisearch: Far simpler if the requirement is application search rather than log analytics
Pricing
What OpenSearch costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
OpenSearch
Free
- Full functionality
- Self-hosted
- No usage limits
Capabilities
Features
Full-text search
Distributed search and indexing over large document sets
OpenSearch Dashboards
Visualisation and exploration, forked from Kibana
Log analytics
Common backend for logs and observability data
Vector search
k-NN search for semantic and similarity use cases
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Is OpenSearch free?
Yes, Apache 2.0 licensed under the Linux Foundation. Amazon OpenSearch Service is a paid managed option.
Why does OpenSearch exist?
Elastic moved Elasticsearch off the Apache 2.0 licence in 2021. AWS forked the last Apache-licensed version, and the project now sits under the Linux Foundation.
Is OpenSearch compatible with Elasticsearch?
It was at the 7.10 fork point. Both have developed independently since, so compatibility weakens with every release and should be verified for the features you use.
Keep looking
Where to go from OpenSearch
- OpenSearch alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- OpenSearch pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- OpenSearch badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Databases softwareThe full category
- Best Databases softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Databases software for
Compare OpenSearch with
- Elasticsearch
- Meilisearch
- Apache Solr
- DuckDB
- Typesense
- QuestDB
- ClickHouse
- MariaDB
- TimescaleDB
- LanceDB
- Marqo
- Nile
- Ninox
- Privacera
- RavenDB
- Apache Flink
- Apache Kafka
- Apache Druid
Other Databases software
The heart of the Elastic Stack for search and analytics
Free, then $16.4/mo11 researched notesMIT-licensed analytical SQL database that runs inside your process, with no server, no dependencies and one writer at a time.
Free plan14 researched notesOpen-source typo-tolerant search engine as an Algolia alternative
Open source9 researched notesFast open source time-series database for high throughput ingestion
Free plan10 researched notesFast open-source column-oriented database for real-time analytics
Free plan12 researched notesTime-series database built on PostgreSQL for real-time analytics
Free plan12 researched notesEmbedded retrieval library over the Apache 2.0 Lance columnar format, with proprietary Cloud and Enterprise tiers for serving at scale.
Pricing on request14 researched notesPostgreSQL database platform built for multi-tenant SaaS applications
Free, then $15/mo11 researched notesCentralised data access governance from the creators of Apache Ranger, now rebranding as Trust3 AI
Pricing on request13 researched notes
Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for OpenSearch, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
More on OpenSearch
OpenSearch alternatives
What people switch to, and what they give up
OpenSearch pricing
Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
Compare OpenSearch
Put it head to head with anything we hold
OpenSearch badge
Its rating, and an embed for your own site
Best Databases software alternatives
Industrial process historian with published per-tag pricing and no client licence fees
Per tag band per year
NetApp-owned managed service for Cassandra, Kafka, OpenSearch, PostgreSQL and Cadence with a bring-your-own-cloud model
quote
Erlang MQTT broker for large IoT fleets, relicensed to BSL with production free use limited to one node
Per month by connection and session volume
Attribute-based access control and masking applied inside Snowflake, Databricks and BigQuery
quote
MPP analytical database with a MySQL wire protocol and sub-second aggregation on wide tables
Open source, no licence fee
Streaming database that maintains incremental materialised views in SQL instead of Flink jobs
Per RisingWave Unit hourCentralised data access governance from the creators of Apache Ranger, now rebranding as Trust3 AI
quote
The Meta-lineage distributed SQL query engine, distinct from the Trino fork
Open source, no licence fee