Elasticsearch is a proprietary search engine owned by Elastic with a freemium model and closed-source components, while OpenSearch is a fully open-source fork maintained by AWS and the community with no proprietary licensing restrictions. Elasticsearch offers more advanced features and enterprise support, whereas OpenSearch provides greater transparency and cost predictability for large-scale deployments.
Elasticsearch vs OpenSearch — Side-by-side comparison on A Versus B
Choose Elasticsearch if you need advanced machine learning capabilities, premium 24/7 enterprise support, and don't mind licensing costs for production workloads. Choose OpenSearch if you prioritize cost savings, full source code transparency, want to avoid vendor lock-in, and can leverage community support or hire dedicated DevOps resources.
Proprietary distributed search and analytics engine by Elastic with cloud-native architecture.
Open-source search engine forked from Elasticsearch 7.10, maintained by AWS and community.
Annual Licensing Cost (Small Deployment)
Elasticsearch vs OpenSearch — Comparison Data
Structured comparison data for Elasticsearch vs OpenSearch with 143 attributes.
Monthly Cost (100GB index, 1M queries/month)
Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) Improvement
Total Cost of Ownership (3-year, 500GB/month ingestion)
Required Infrastructure Team Size (100 users)
Typical Query Latency (1B rows, GROUP BY)
Query Performance (Complex Aggregations)
Elasticsearch vs OpenSearch — Attribute Category Vocabulary
Taxonomy of attribute categories used to classify comparison data for Elasticsearch vs OpenSearch.
Can I migrate from Elasticsearch to OpenSearch without downtime?
Yes, OpenSearch maintains 99% API compatibility with Elasticsearch, enabling snapshot-based migration. You can create a snapshot from Elasticsearch 6.8 or 7.x and restore it directly into OpenSearch. However, Elasticsearch 8.x+ uses proprietary features; migration requires index replication during the transition. AWS recommends a blue-green deployment strategy with 1-2 hours of read-only mode during cutover.
Why did AWS fork Elasticsearch into OpenSearch?
In January 2021, Elastic changed Elasticsearch's license from open-source SSPL to a proprietary Elastic License + AGPL, restricting cloud providers from offering managed services. AWS forked the last open-source version (7.10) to maintain community-driven development. This gives AWS freedom to offer Amazon OpenSearch Service without licensing restrictions and allows enterprises to avoid proprietary licensing costs.
Is OpenSearch suitable for production use at enterprise scale?
Yes, OpenSearch powers production clusters at AWS, Capital One, Viasat, and other Fortune 500 companies handling petabytes of data. However, you must provide your own 24/7 support team or hire AWS Managed Services. Elasticsearch's premium support tier is better for organizations lacking DevOps expertise.
What machine learning features does OpenSearch lack?
OpenSearch lacks Elasticsearch's ML suite: no anomaly detection, forecasting, or automated alerting. However, OpenSearch supports plugins for basic alerting and anomaly detection via third-party tools like OpenSearch Anomaly Detection plugin (community-maintained). For real-time ML workloads, Elasticsearch ML is significantly more mature with production-grade algorithms.
How much can switching to OpenSearch save on licensing?
Elasticsearch Gold tier costs $7,200/year minimum plus additional per-node fees. A mid-sized cluster (10 nodes) costs $15,000-$25,000 annually. OpenSearch has zero licensing costs but may require 1-2 dedicated DevOps engineers ($150k-$200k annually). Organizations with existing DevOps talent save $15,000-$25,000/year; those hiring new staff break even or lose money.