OpenSearch review covering search, analytics, observability and vector search features, self-hosted and AWS managed pricing, and alternatives to Elasticsearch.
OpenSearch is a distributed search and analytics engine that started life as an AWS-led fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana in 2021, created after Elastic changed those projects' licenses away from Apache 2.0. Since September 2024 it has been governed independently by the OpenSearch Software Foundation under the Linux Foundation, with AWS, SAP, and Uber as premier members.
It is used for full-text search, log and metrics analytics, security analytics, and vector search, with OpenSearch Dashboards providing the visualization and exploration layer, functionally similar to Kibana.
OpenSearch bundles features that are typically paywalled in competing products, including role-based access control, SAML/LDAP authentication, alerting, anomaly detection, and machine learning plugins, all under the permissive Apache 2.0 license.
Its k-NN vector search plugin supports embedding-based similarity search, making it a common choice for AI-powered search and retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, alongside its established use in log analytics and observability stacks.
OpenSearch itself is free and open source with no licensing fees for self-hosting on your own infrastructure.
Organizations that want a managed experience typically pay for Amazon OpenSearch Service or OpenSearch Serverless on a usage basis (compute, storage, and data transfer), or use third-party managed hosting from vendors such as Aiven, DigitalOcean, or Instaclustr, whose pricing varies by provider and cluster size.
Yes, OpenSearch is free and open source under the Apache 2.0 license; costs only apply if you use a managed hosting service such as Amazon OpenSearch Service.
Since September 2024, OpenSearch has been governed by the OpenSearch Software Foundation, an open technical project within the Linux Foundation, with AWS, SAP, and Uber as premier members.
AWS created OpenSearch in 2021 as a fork of the last Apache 2.0 versions of Elasticsearch and Kibana after Elastic relicensed those projects under the Server Side Public License.
OpenSearch shares a common codebase origin with Elasticsearch and remains largely API-compatible for many operations, though the two projects have diverged over time.
Yes, its k-NN plugin supports vector embeddings and similarity search, and the project is actively developing GPU acceleration for large-scale vector workloads.
It is OpenSearch's built-in visualization and analytics interface, functionally equivalent to Kibana, used to explore logs, metrics, and search results.
The main alternatives are Elasticsearch, Apache Solr, Algolia, Meilisearch, and Typesense.