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Amazon OpenSearch Service vs Elastic Search comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 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 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 (29th), Log Management (17th)
Elastic Search
Ranking in Search as a Service
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
100
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (8th), Vector Databases (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon OpenSearch Service is 13.4%, up from 5.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 15.3%, down from 18.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Elastic Search15.3%
Amazon OpenSearch Service13.4%
Other71.3%
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.
reviewer2817942 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Logging and vector search have transformed observability and empowered reliable ai agents
Elastic Search is not specifically being used for certain purposes. I deploy Elastic Search database on the cloud and use cloud services so that nobody can attack. However, I do not use Elastic Search to resolve attack issues. The basic main purpose of Elastic Search, as of now, I feel it can do more in the AI area. Sometime I saw that when I am developing RAG and have to generate the embeddings, which I call metadata, sometimes it tries to fail. That durability or issue handling should be improved, but apart from that, I did not find anything as of now. As per my use case, whatever I am using seems pretty good. Apart from that, some definitely improvement will be there. One improvement is that it should be faster. Whenever I am searching any logs, it takes much time. For example, if I open my log in Notepad or a similar tool, I can search the text within a second. With Elastic Search, it takes a little bit of time, ten to fifteen seconds. That can be improved. Sometimes, engineers take time to assign when I create a ticket.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"I would definitely recommend Amazon OpenSearch Service to other professionals due to its fast and reliable search capabilities."
"It's actually easier to collaborate since it is already deployed in the AWS cloud itself."
"It's a good log management platform. In terms of infrastructure management, it's good."
"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."
"In case there is a failure, Elastic manages everything well, and there no major downtime."
"AWS has now made our life easy."
"The business analytics capabilities are the most important feature it provides."
"The special text processing features in this solution are very important for me."
"Elasticsearch helps us to store the data in key value pairs and, based on that, we can produce visualisations in Kibana."
"The search speed is most valuable and important."
"Dashboard is very customizable."
"The initial setup is fairly simple."
"It is a stable and good platform."
"The tool's stability and performance are good."
"The most valuable features are the detection and correlation features."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"There is the problem with the database. Amazon only provides the host to run to 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."
"I want to see a new feature in Amazon Elasticsearch Service that allows users to create default filters for filtered levels."
"There are some features and functionality that could be enhanced in Elastic Search to improve its overall capabilities."
"More AI would be beneficial. I would also appreciate more simplicity in dashboards."
"There is a lack of technical people to develop, implement and optimize equipment operation and web queries."
"The open source version should ship basic security versions with it."
"The setup is somewhat complicated due to multiple dependencies and relations with different systems."
"Elasticsearch is useful for different business processes, but there are some problems."
"The solution has quite a steep learning curve. The usability and general user-friendliness could be improved. However, that is kind of typical with products that have a lot of flexibility, or a lot of capabilities. Sometimes having more choices makes things more complex. It makes it difficult to configure it, though. It's kind of a bitter pill that you have to swallow in the beginning and you really have to get through it."
"Logstash has been a challenge and needs improvements in data ingestion reconciliation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You only pay for what you use."
"Compared to other cloud platforms, it is manageable and not very expensive."
"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."
"To access all the features available you require both the open source license and the production license."
"We are using the open-sourced version."
"The price of Elastic Enterprise is very, very competitive."
"An X-Pack license is more affordable than Splunk."
"I rate Elastic Search's pricing an eight out of ten."
"The tool is an open-source product."
"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 paying $1,500 a month to use the solution. If you want to have endpoint protection you need to pay more."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business40
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise50
 

Questions from the Community

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 ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ELK Elasticsearch?
The pricing for Elastic Search is mainly budgeted according to the organization budget, so we take it as a yearly subscription, and that is acceptable since we do get a fair discount when we are ta...
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
When we get the logs, it is mostly about how we edit the configurations and how we make changes according to the requirements of our organization. In these cases, the logs sometimes can be a bit in...
What is your primary use case for ELK Elasticsearch?
I am the Elastic Search admin for my organization, and we are using Elastic Search to handle the traffic to GCP. The monitoring of all the clusters and all the deployments are quite good, and compa...
 

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 2026.
920,929 professionals have used our research since 2012.