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Amazon OpenSearch Service vs Elastic Search comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 11, 2025

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 OpenSearch Service
Ranking in Search as a Service
3rd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (25th), Log Management (20th)
Elastic Search
Ranking in Search as a Service
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (9th), Vector Databases (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon OpenSearch Service is 4.5%, down from 14.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 19.3%, up from 10.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Search19.3%
Amazon OpenSearch Service4.5%
Other76.2%
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

Johnny Suleiman - PeerSpot reviewer
Scalability is a key feature as it allows easy scaling of the platform without downtime
OpenSearch is used as a search engine for specific logs, mainly in e-commerce and monitoring the logs themselves. It is very valuable for e-commerce, enabling data analysis on application logs and customer behavior, and can be integrated with other services, including AI and machine learning…
Louis McCoy - PeerSpot reviewer
Searches through billions of documents have become impressively fast and consistent
The seamless scalability is something I see as among the best features Elastic Search offers. The speed with which Elastic Search is able to search through all of the documents we place into it is quite remarkable, as we search through 65 billion documents in less than a second in most cases, on a constant consistent basis. I find configuring relevant searches within Elastic Search platform very straightforward. Elastic Search is easily scalable. The customer support for Elastic Search is quite good. I advise others looking into using Elastic Search to think about the future of your platform and where you intend it to be in five years, and based on that, which version of Elastic Search best suits the needs of your platform. Additionally, jump into the AI products first as you're in the planning phase so that as you're filling out your data, the AI products and machine learning products can enrich the data real-time early on in the process, which will save you a lot of time later. The overall performance of the platform, scalability of the platform and other additional features, especially when it comes to AI, really earn the nine.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's a good log management platform. In terms of infrastructure management, it's good."
"In case there is a failure, Elastic manages everything well, and there no major downtime."
"The stability of the product is good."
"Amazon OpenSearch Service has enhanced our organization's ability to store and search large amounts of data efficiently."
"Regarding valuable features of the solution, we found with the process, which we have used in both cases where we used the solution that while you're seeing the streaming of data, you can analyze in the initial phase what sort of data you are streaming and whether it is valuable."
"I would definitely recommend Amazon OpenSearch Service to other professionals due to its fast and reliable search capabilities."
"The business analytics capabilities are the most important feature it provides."
"Amazon OpenSearch Service provides a managed database solution, so we don't need to manage everything ourselves."
"I really like the visualization that you can do within it. That's really handy. Product-wise, it is a very good and stable product."
"The solution is quite scalable and this is one of its advantages."
"The search speed is most valuable and important."
"The initial installation and setup were straightforward."
"We can easily collect all the data and view historical trends using the product. We can view the applications and identify the issues effectively."
"Elastic Search is very quick when handling a large volume of data."
"It's a stable solution and we have not had any issues."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its utility and usefulness."
 

Cons

"In terms of data handling capabilities with Amazon OpenSearch Service, they can be complex and managing data in comparison to other SIM solutions is a major drawback, as it is very hard to handle the data."
"The configuration should be more straightforward because we had to select a lot of things."
"Amazon Elasticsearch can improve the bullion in the near search and the ease of integration with Kibana. Additionally, there could be more flexibility in the configuration and documentation."
"One improvement I would like to see is support for auto-scaling."
"I want to see a new feature in Amazon Elasticsearch Service that allows users to create default filters for filtered levels."
"They can enhance data visualization."
"There is a problem with the database. Amazon only provides the hosting to run our applications bias, but there is no option to manage the database within the Elasticsearch product."
"The price is fair yet leans towards the expensive side. I'd rate it five out of ten with respect to capabilities vs. cost."
"Scalability and ROI are the areas they have to improve."
"Its licensing needs to be improved. They don't offer a perpetual license. They want to know how many nodes you will be using, and they ask for an annual subscription. Otherwise, they don't give you permission to use it. Our customers are generally military or police departments or customers without connection to the internet. Therefore, this model is not suitable for us. This subscription-based model is not the best for OEM vendors. Another annoying thing about Elasticsearch is its roadmap. We are developing something, and then they say, "Okay. We have removed that feature in this release," and when we are adapting to that release, they say, "Okay. We have removed that one as well." We don't know what they will remove in the next version. They are not looking for backward compatibility from the customers' perspective. They just remove a feature and say, "Okay. We've removed this one." In terms of new features, it should have an ODBC driver so that you can search and integrate this product with existing BI tools and reporting tools. Currently, you need to go for third parties, such as CData, in order to achieve this. ODBC driver is the most important feature required. Its Community Edition does not have security features. For example, you cannot authenticate with a username and password. It should have security features. They might have put it in the latest release."
"It was not possible to use authentication three years back. You needed to buy the product's services for authentication."
"There is another solution I'm testing which has a 500 record limit when you do a search on Elastic Enterprise Search. That's the only area in which I'm not sure whether it's a limitation on our end in terms of knowledge or a technical limitation from Elastic Enterprise Search. There is another solution we are looking at that rides on Elastic Enterprise Search. And the limit is for any sort of records that you're doing or data analysis you're trying to do, you can only extract 500 records at a time. I know the open-source nature has a lot of limitations, Otherwise, Elastic Enterprise Search is a fantastic solution and I'd recommend it to anyone."
"Elastic Search should provide better guides for developers."
"I would like to see more integration for the solution with different platforms."
"Performance improvement could come from skipping background refresh on search idle shards (which is already being addressed in the upcoming seventh version)."
"Dashboards could be more flexible, and it would be nice to provide more drill-down capabilities."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is not expensive, but priced averagely, I will say."
"Compared to other cloud platforms, it is manageable and not very expensive."
"There is a community edition available and the price of the commercial offering is reasonable."
"You only pay for what you use."
"It can move from $10,000 US Dollars per year to any price based on how powerful you need the searches to be and the capacity in terms of storage and process."
"We are using the free open-sourced version of this solution."
"The price could be better."
"The cost varies based on factors like usage volume, network load, data storage size, and service utilization. If your usage isn't too extensive, the cost will be lower."
"Elastic Search is open-source, but you need to pay for support, which is expensive."
"We are using the open-sourced version."
"we are using a licensed version of the product."
"This is a free, open source software (FOSS) tool, which means no cost on the front-end. There are no free lunches in this world though. Technical skill to implement and support are costly on the back-end with ELK, whether you train/hire internally or go for premium services from Elastic."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise2
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise37
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon OpenSearch Service?
We retrieve historical data with just a click of a button to move it from cold to hot or warm because it's already stored in the backend storage
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?
In terms of data handling capabilities with Amazon OpenSearch Service, they can be complex and managing data in comparison to other SIM solutions is a major drawback, as it is very hard to handle t...
What do you like most about ELK Elasticsearch?
Logsign provides us with the capability to execute multiple queries according to our requirements. The indexing is very high, making it effective for storing and retrieving logs. The real-time anal...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ELK Elasticsearch?
We used the open-source version of Elasticsearch, which was free.
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
We could benefit from refining the machine learning models that we currently use in Elastic Search, along with the possibility to integrate agents, intelligent artificial intelligence, form of agen...
 

Also Known As

Amazon Elasticsearch Service
Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

VIDCOIN, Wyng, Yellow New Zealand, zipMoney, Cimri, Siemens, Unbabel
T-Mobile, Adobe, Booking.com, BMW, Telegraph Media Group, Cisco, Karbon, Deezer, NORBr, Labelbox, Fingerprint, Relativity, NHS Hospital, Met Office, Proximus, Go1, Mentat, Bluestone Analytics, Humanz, Hutch, Auchan, Sitecore, Linklaters, Socren, Infotrack, Pfizer, Engadget, Airbus, Grab, Vimeo, Ticketmaster, Asana, Twilio, Blizzard, Comcast, RWE and many others.
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon OpenSearch Service vs. Elastic Search and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,883 professionals have used our research since 2012.