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Amazon Kendra vs Amazon OpenSearch Service comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 22, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Kendra
Ranking in Search as a Service
8th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Amazon OpenSearch Service
Ranking in Search as a Service
3rd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (22nd), Log Management (19th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon Kendra is 5.7%, down from 14.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon OpenSearch Service is 11.5%, up from 7.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon OpenSearch Service11.5%
Amazon Kendra5.7%
Other82.8%
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

AM
Architect at IGT Solutions
Kendra has a nice AI built-in, enhancing the search experience and highly stable solution
There are many valuable features. For example, there are many documents that contain a lot of legal information. So we want to understand whether all the documents have the required complaint-related information or not, and whether they are following the standard policies of documentation. We have multiple documents, so we don't know which document has the sought-after information. Therefore, we want to perform an enterprise search on it. So there are a lot of use cases we are trying to build using these newer technologies, specifically Kendra. Moreover, Kendra has AI, which has an upper edge, and that is really helpful. It has a nice AI inbuilt, which improves the search part of it.
Md. Shahariar Hossen - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at Cefalo
Event tracking has become smoother and data analytics provide clear insights for user actions
Amazon OpenSearch Service is not providing the processing feature directly. From Amazon OpenSearch Service, we are actually maintaining the AWS SQS, the queue service, which is responsible for providing information about what data has to be modified. So using that SQS, we're actually providing it, but we're not directly using Amazon OpenSearch Service for keeping data to other data pipeline thing. So far we didn't use it for any machine learning purposes, but in future, we have plans to extend or implement this feature. Since AWS itself is secure and Amazon OpenSearch Service is a part of this entire ecosystem, it becomes much easier for security purposes. From the validation point of view, Amazon OpenSearch Service itself provides easy to communicate APIs and up-to-date documents, which is much beneficial. For example, if I'm missing anything, I can directly go and check the documentation. That is actually much easier. I would rate it as really good so far. It's much faster. For our local machine, we can also use a kind of replica of Amazon OpenSearch Service just for development purposes. That is another good feature. I would say for the encryption thing and also the user access control management, it's much faster. For some of these hashing algorithms, it also worked really well so far. To be honest, I didn't find any places where it can be improved. However, I think they could provide more abstraction. For example, still for searching, we have to write down the queries in a specific manner, such as for a specific JSON structure or in a specific way. Otherwise, they don't provide us the actual results. For at least this purpose, I think abstraction could be a bit easier or a bit improved. Other than that, right now there is the age of AI, so some kind of prompting could also work, but I'm not sure how it could be integrated. As a user, lower prices or reasonable pricing is always better. Those can be improved as well. However, it is good that most of the services including Amazon OpenSearch Service actually provide pay as you go pricing. So if there were a bit lower version or a bit less payment methodology, it might be much better.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"We have good use cases where stability is everything. So it's a stable solution."
"Until recently, there wasn't an out-of-the-box service in the market for enterprise documents like Kendra."
"Provides flexibility to tune the relevance and ranking of results."
"AWS has now made our life easy."
"In case there is a failure, Elastic manages everything well, and there no major downtime."
"Amazon OpenSearch Service has enhanced our organization's ability to store and search large amounts of data efficiently."
"Amazon OpenSearch Service provides a managed database solution, so we don't need to manage everything ourselves."
"They have the good documentation in the help text and that is the reason the Amazon Elasticsearch is the perfect solution for the current market."
"They have the good documentation in the help text and that is the reason the Amazon is the perfect solution in the current market."
"The initial set up is very easy...We really appreciate Amazon!"
"It enables us to efficiently search and retrieve our event data, offering us a versatile approach to locate specific information within these logs."
 

Cons

"This is a really, really expensive solution making the adoption of it very difficult at the enterprise level."
"There are some token limits."
"The time it takes for indexing documents could be reduced."
"One improvement I would like to see is support for auto-scaling."
"The configuration should be more straightforward because we had to select a lot of things."
"I want to see a new feature in Amazon Elasticsearch Service that allows users to create default filters for filtered levels."
"The configuration should be more straightforward because we had to select a lot of things."
"The pricing aspect is a concern. The service is way too costly. For the past month, I used only 30 to 40 MB of data, and the cost was $500. AWS could improve pricing."
"As a user, lower prices or reasonable pricing is always better."
"I would say that, basically, the configuration part is an area with a shortcoming...Some upgradation is required on the configuration side so that we can get to use it."
"We faced documentation challenges during integration after migrating from Elasticsearch to Amazon OpenSearch Service. Better documentation on integration, query handling, and a more user-friendly UI could enhance the product."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing falls in the medium range."
"There is a community edition available and the price of the commercial offering is reasonable."
"The solution is not expensive, but priced averagely, I will say."
"Compared to other cloud platforms, it is manageable and not very expensive."
"You only pay for what you use."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon OpenSearch Service?
I would consider the pricing as a six based on how much data we are handling; if we handle minimal data, it's cheap, but for large data, it becomes costly. Our clients usually pay between $1,000 to...
What needs improvement with Amazon OpenSearch Service?
Amazon OpenSearch Service is not providing the processing feature directly. From Amazon OpenSearch Service, we are actually maintaining the AWS SQS, the queue service, which is responsible for prov...
What is your primary use case for Amazon OpenSearch Service?
Amazon OpenSearch Service is a user-friendly version of Elasticsearch, as per my understanding. I have been using it for our volunteer management system where around 5,000 to 6,000 users are using ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Amazon Elasticsearch Service
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
VIDCOIN, Wyng, Yellow New Zealand, zipMoney, Cimri, Siemens, Unbabel
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Kendra vs. Amazon OpenSearch Service and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
896,563 professionals have used our research since 2012.