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Amazon OpenSearch Service vs Elastic Search comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 16, 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
6.7
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (23rd), Log Management (19th)
Elastic Search
Ranking in Search as a Service
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
88
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (5th), Vector Databases (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon OpenSearch Service is 9.6%, down from 10.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 18.3%, up from 14.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Search18.3%
Amazon OpenSearch Service9.6%
Other72.1%
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Vaibhav Shukla - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at Agoda
Search performance has transformed large-scale intent discovery and hybrid query handling
While Elastic Search is a good product, I see areas for improvement, particularly regarding the misconception that any amount of data can simply be dumped into Elastic Search. When creating an index, careful consideration of data massaging is essential. Elastic Search stores mappings for various data types, which must remain below a certain threshold to maintain functionality. Users need to throttle the number of fields for searching to avoid overloading the system and ensure that the design of the document is efficient for the Elastic Search index. Additionally, I suggest utilizing ILM periodically throughout the year to manage data shuffling between clusters, preventing hotspots in the distribution of requests across nodes.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 most valuable features of Amazon Elasticsearch are ease of use, native JSON, and efficiency. Additionally, handles many use cases and search grammar was useful."
"In case there is a failure, Elastic manages everything well, and there no major downtime."
"It enables us to efficiently search and retrieve our event data, offering us a versatile approach to locate specific information within these logs."
"The business analytics capabilities are the most important feature it provides."
"It's actually easier to collaborate since it is already deployed in the AWS cloud itself."
"This service already sorts data like vectors. They have classified the storage pre-defined."
"It is highly valuable because of its simplicity in maintenance, where most tasks are handled for you, and it offers a plethora of built-in features."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its utility and usefulness."
"The most valuable feature is the out of the box Kibana."
"Big businesses cannot survive without Elastic Search because it gives us very good visibility and handles our use cases very well."
"The machine learning features of Elastic Search are very interesting, including the possibility to include models such as ELSER and different multilingual models that let us fine-tune our searches and use them in our search projects."
"The solution has good security features. I have been happy with the dashboards and interface."
"Decision-making has become much faster due to real-time data and quick responses."
"The solution has great scalability."
 

Cons

"One glaring issue was with our mapping configuration as the system accepted the data we posted, but after a few months, when we attempted complex queries, we realized the date formatting had become problematic."
"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."
"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."
"As a user, lower prices or reasonable pricing is always better."
"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."
"One improvement I would like to see is support for auto-scaling."
"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."
"Elastic Search needs to improve authentication. It also needs to work on the Kibana visualization dashboard."
"They should improve its documentation. Their official documentation is not very informative. They can also improve their technical support. They don't help you much with the customized stuff. They also need to add more visuals. Currently, they have line charts, bar charts, and things like that, and they can add more types of visuals. They should also improve the alerts. They are not very simple to use and are a bit complex. They could add more options to the alerting system."
"There should be more stability."
"An improvement would be to have an interface that allows easier navigation and tracing of logs."
"The documentation for Elastic Search can be challenging if you're not already familiar with the platform."
"Technical support should be faster."
"There are a lot of manual steps on the operating system. It could be simplified in the user interface."
"While integrating with tools like agents for ingesting data from sources like firewalls is valuable, I believe prioritizing improvements to the core product would be more beneficial."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You only pay for what you use."
"The solution is not expensive, but priced averagely, I will say."
"There is a community edition available and the price of the commercial offering is reasonable."
"Compared to other cloud platforms, it is manageable and not very expensive."
"The basic license is free, but it comes with a lot of features that aren't free. With a gold license, we get active directory integration. With a platinum license, we get alerting."
"The premium license is expensive."
"we are using a licensed version of the product."
"I rate Elastic Search's pricing an eight out of ten."
"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 use the free version for some logs, but not extensive use."
"We are using the free open-sourced version of this solution."
"The solution is affordable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise43
 

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?
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 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?
Elastic Search's pricing totally depends on the server. Managed services from AWS are used, and we have worked on a self-managed Elastic Search cluster. On the AWS side, it is very expensive becaus...
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
To be honest, there is only one downside of Elastic Search that makes sense because we use a basic license, which is a free license. We do not have some features available because of the free licen...
 

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: December 2025.
881,565 professionals have used our research since 2012.