Log analytics · OpenSearch Software Foundation (originated at Amazon)

OpenSearch

Open-source fork of Elasticsearch/Kibana for log analytics and search, now governed under the Linux Foundation.

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OpenSearch is the Apache-2.0 licensed fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana that Amazon created in 2021 after Elastic moved to a source-available license, and which now lives under the OpenSearch Software Foundation (Linux Foundation) with contributors beyond AWS. It provides the same core capabilities as its origin — distributed search, log analytics dashboards (OpenSearch Dashboards), and a Security Analytics plugin for detection use cases — while remaining fully open source and forkable. Most users run it self-managed or via a managed service such as Amazon OpenSearch Service, which bills for the underlying compute/storage rather than for OpenSearch itself, since the software carries no license fee.

At a glance

Vendor OpenSearch Software Foundation (originated at Amazon)
Pricing model Open source + paid options
Free tier Yes
Deployment Cloud, Self-hosted
Open source Yes (Apache-2.0)
Best for Teams that want an Elasticsearch-compatible, fully open-source log analytics stack without license-model risk.

Pricing

The software is free under Apache-2.0; cost is entirely the compute/storage of self-hosting or a managed service like Amazon OpenSearch Service.

Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site.

Features

  • Distributed search and log analytics on a Lucene-based engine
  • OpenSearch Dashboards for visualization
  • Security Analytics plugin for detection rules
  • k-NN vector search
  • Index lifecycle management for hot/warm/cold tiering
  • Fully open-source, forkable under Apache-2.0

Integrations

Profile last reviewed September 21, 2026

Alternatives

Elasticsearch Distributed search and analytics engine underlying the ELK stack, used for log analytics, full-text search and, via Elastic Security, SIEM. Graylog Self-hostable log management platform with a free source-available core and paid Enterprise/Security tiers billed by daily volume. Grafana Loki Open-source log aggregation system that indexes only metadata labels, designed to pair cheaply with Grafana dashboards.

OpenSearch in the index now

Terms to know

Data observability Continuous automated monitoring of pipelines and datasets to catch freshness, volume and quality problems early. Semantic search Search that matches results to a query's meaning rather than its exact keywords, using vector similarity between embeddings.

Related guides

How to choose a log analytics tool Pick a log platform by who owns it, whether you index everything or only labels, and how the pricing model behaves as volume grows.