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Amazon OpenSearch Service vs Elastic Security 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 Log Management
19th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (23rd), Search as a Service (3rd)
Elastic Security
Ranking in Log Management
9th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
66
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (5th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (14th), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (5th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Amazon OpenSearch Service is 2.2%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Security is 2.9%, down from 3.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Security2.9%
Amazon OpenSearch Service2.2%
Other94.9%
Log Management
 

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.
Laurentiu Popescu - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Product Officer at ClusterPower
Has improved threat detection with deep log analysis and streamlined investigation workflows
The most useful features I find in Elastic Security are the forensic ones that allow us to carry deeper analysis into the logs for in-depth investigations, and the dashboards, with the reporting dashboard being quite user-friendly. Elastic Security is quite good at identifying threats, as it is part of the deep investigation tool that I mentioned before. Unless we need to look further into a certain log, we can carry out a deeper analysis and forensics on those particular logs. I can assess the impact of Elastic Security's real-time data analysis on our threat response efficiency as working pretty good. We are looking for real-time analysis because we have a continuous inflow of logs from different sources: from our cloud, from Active Directory, from our network. So it works pretty well.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"They have the good documentation in the help text and that is the reason the Amazon is the perfect solution in the current market."
"In case there is a failure, Elastic manages everything well, and there no major downtime."
"It's actually easier to collaborate since it is already deployed in the AWS cloud itself."
"Our customers have seen tangible benefits from Amazon OpenSearch Service, especially in terms of their applications running smoothly, so they do get a return on investment."
"The customer service is excellent, rated nine out of ten."
"I would definitely recommend Amazon OpenSearch Service to other professionals due to its fast and reliable search capabilities."
"It can handle millions of loads at a time, and you can always use the filters to find exactly what you are looking for and detect errors in every log message you are searching for, basically."
"One of the most valuable features of this solution is that it is more flexible than AlienVault."
"Elastic Security is very easy to adapt."
"What customers found most valuable in Elastic Security feature-wise is the search capability, in particular, the way of writing the search query and the speed of searching for results."
"It is the best open-source product for people working in SO, managing and analyzing logs."
"It's open-source and free to use."
"It's simple and easy to use."
"The scalability is good. It can be scaled easily in the production environment."
 

Cons

"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."
"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 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."
"It would be beneficial to have some level of customization available in the managed service, tailored to the specific use cases of the end users."
"The configuration should be more straightforward because we had to select a lot of things."
"The price is fair yet leans towards the expensive side. I'd rate it five out of ten with respect to capabilities vs. cost."
"They can enhance data visualization."
"One thing they could add is a quick step to enable users who don't have a solid background to build a dashboard and quickly search, without difficulty."
"We had issues with scalability. Logstash was not scaling and aggregation was getting delayed. We moved to Fluentd making our stack from ELK to EFK."
"Authentication is not a default in Kibana. We need to have another tool to have authentication and authorization. These two should be part of Kibana."
"I would like more ways to manage permissions and restrict access to certain users."
"Elastic Security consumes a lot of resources, requiring a substantial deployment setup."
"Elastic Security's maintenance is hard and its scalability is a challenge. There are complications in scaling and upgrading. The solution needs to also provide periodic upgrade checks."
"If you compare this with CrowdStrike or Carbon Black, they can improve."
"In terms of what could be improved with Elastic, in some use cases, especially on the advanced level, they are not ready made, so you'll have to write some scripts."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a community edition available and the price of the commercial offering is reasonable."
"You only pay for what you use."
"The solution is not expensive, but priced averagely, I will say."
"Compared to other cloud platforms, it is manageable and not very expensive."
"The base product is open-source but if you need advanced security features then you need to pay for the subscription. Elastic Security's price is reasonable in some cases and in other cases it's not."
"Elastic Stack is an open-source tool. You don't have to pay anything for the components."
"The tool's pricing is flexible and comes at unit cost. You don't have to pay for everything."
"Affordable but with additional costs"
"The product offers an amazing pricing structure. Price-wise, the product is very competitive."
"I find it better than Splunk in terms of cost-effectiveness. For cost-effectiveness, I would rate it a nine out of 10."
"The solution is free."
"It is easy to deploy, easy to use, and you get everything you need to become operational with it, and have nothing further to pay unless you want the OLED plugin."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

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 Business40
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise15
 

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...
Datadog vs ELK: which one is good in terms of performance, cost and efficiency?
With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately using the dashboards we have created with Datadog; they are very good c...
What do you like most about Elastic Security?
Elastic provides the capability to index quickly due to the reverse indexes it offers. This data is crucial as it contains critical information. The reverse index allows fast data indexing because ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Security?
I am satisfied with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing cost. It is a pure 10.
 

Also Known As

Amazon Elasticsearch Service
Elastic SIEM, ELK Logstash
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

VIDCOIN, Wyng, Yellow New Zealand, zipMoney, Cimri, Siemens, Unbabel
Texas A&M, U.S. Air Force, NuScale Power, Martin's Point Health Care
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon OpenSearch Service vs. Elastic Security and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
882,479 professionals have used our research since 2012.