---
lang: en
title: Elasticsearch vs OpenSearch
canonical: "https://saasspecs.com/elasticsearch-vs-opensearch/"
hvce_version: 1
tenant: saasspecs
slug: elasticsearch-vs-opensearch
record_kind: comparison
content_sha256: 9e081b482892713a5ea48186093e33e966e706d2758fb6bd0afed0cfb6472ccd
indexed_at: "2026-06-15T06:32:32.875Z"
license: citation-free
entities:
  -
    role: a
    slug: elasticsearch
    name: Elasticsearch
    type: Thing
    profile_url: "https://saasspecs.com/item/elasticsearch/?format=md"
  -
    role: b
    slug: opensearch
    name: OpenSearch
    type: Thing
    profile_url: "https://saasspecs.com/item/opensearch/?format=md"
---
# Elasticsearch vs OpenSearch

## Pair

- **A**: Elasticsearch
- **B**: OpenSearch

## Entity A

- **Title**: [Elasticsearch](https://saasspecs.com/item/elasticsearch/?format=md)
- **Schema type**: Corporation
- **Website**: https://www.elastic.co
- **Email**: support@elastic.co
- **Address**: 800 Mission Street, San Francisco, California, 94103, United States
- **Coordinates**: 37.7749, -122.4194
- **Deployment Link**: [Deploy Elasticsearch Stack Layer](https://www.elastic.co/cloud/elasticsearch/service/signup)

### Summary

Industry-standard distributed search and analytics engine with full-text search, aggregations, and vector search.

### Description

Elasticsearch powers full-text search, log analytics, and vector similarity queries across distributed clusters. Elastic Cloud offers managed hosting while the open-source build supports self-hosted deployments.

### Expert insight

Use index lifecycle management to roll hot indices to warm tiers and control storage costs on long-retention log data.

### Attributes

- **Free Tier Allowance**: Self-Hosted Only
- **Rate Limit Cap**: Cluster Bound
- **Session Lifetime**: 24 Hours
- **Overage Fee per 1k MAU**: $0
- **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

## Entity B

- **Title**: [OpenSearch](https://saasspecs.com/item/opensearch/?format=md)
- **Schema type**: Corporation
- **Website**: https://opensearch.org
- **Email**: info@opensearch.org
- **Address**: 410 Terry Ave N, Seattle, Washington, 98109, United States
- **Coordinates**: 47.6225, -122.3362
- **Deployment Link**: [Deploy OpenSearch Stack Layer](https://aws.amazon.com/opensearch-service/pricing/)

### Summary

Open-source search and analytics suite forked from Elasticsearch with neural search and observability plugins.

### Description

OpenSearch delivers distributed full-text search, log analytics, and k-NN vector search under the Apache 2.0 license. AWS OpenSearch Service and self-hosted clusters support production deployments.

### Expert insight

Enable k-NN vector search plugins early when building hybrid retrieval pipelines to avoid reindexing after traffic scales.

### Attributes

- **Free Tier Allowance**: Open Source
- **Rate Limit Cap**: Cluster Bound
- **Session Lifetime**: 24 Hours
- **Overage Fee per 1k MAU**: $0
- **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

## Facts (machine-readable)

| axis | unit | a_value | b_value | a_display | b_display |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Session Lifetime | Hours | 24 | 24 | 24 Hours | 24 Hours |
| Overage Fee per 1k MAU | USD | 0 | 0 | 0 USD | 0 USD |

## Metrics

- **Session Lifetime**: 24 Hours / 24 Hours
- **Overage Fee per 1k MAU**: 0 USD / 0 USD

## Comparison context

This comparison covers the following catalog entities:

- [Elasticsearch](https://saasspecs.com/item/elasticsearch/?format=md) (a)
- [OpenSearch](https://saasspecs.com/item/opensearch/?format=md) (b)