Elasticsearch vs OpenSearch Search

Elasticsearch vs OpenSearch Specs
  • Session Lifetime
  • Overage Fee per 1k MAU
Comparison chart between Elasticsearch and OpenSearch raw data
MetricElasticsearchOpenSearch
Session Lifetime24 Hours24 Hours
Overage Fee per 1k MAU$0$0
Deploy Elasticsearch
👉 Open Source Core • Unbound Enterprise Cluster Search
Deploy OpenSearch Core
👉 100% Open Source Apache 2.0 • Community Driven
Elasticsearch
Free Tier Allowance:
Self-Hosted Only
Rate Limit Cap:
Cluster Bound
MFA Support:
Enforced via Elastic Cloud console MFA and SAML-enforced organization login
Enterprise SSO SAML:
Supported on Enterprise plans with SAML, OIDC, and RBAC
Custom Domain Support:
Custom domains and private endpoints on Elastic Cloud Enterprise
Supported SDKs:
JavaScript, Python, Java, Go, Ruby, PHP, .NET, REST, Elasticsearch DSL
Social Providers:
Google and corporate SSO for Elastic Cloud account management
Compliance Standards:
SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, GDPR on Enterprise tiers
Webhook Fallback Policy:
Watcher alerts and ingest pipelines with dead-letter index replay patterns
OpenSearch
Free Tier Allowance:
Open Source
Rate Limit Cap:
Cluster Bound
MFA Support:
Enforced via AWS IAM and OpenSearch dashboard access policies
Enterprise SSO SAML:
Supported on Amazon OpenSearch Service with SAML and Cognito federation
Custom Domain Support:
VPC-bound domains with AWS PrivateLink and custom endpoint routing
Supported SDKs:
JavaScript, Python, Java, Go, Ruby, .NET, REST, OpenSearch DSL
Social Providers:
AWS IAM and corporate SSO for OpenSearch Service authentication
Compliance Standards:
SOC 1/2/3, ISO 27001, HIPAA Eligible, PCI-DSS Compliant, FedRAMP Moderate
Webhook Fallback Policy:
Alerting plugins and event-driven indexing with configurable retry policies
Elasticsearch
Use index lifecycle management to roll hot indices to warm tiers and control storage costs on long-retention log data.
OpenSearch
Enable k-NN vector search plugins early when building hybrid retrieval pipelines to avoid reindexing after traffic scales.