Search
Elasticsearch has 3 supported release lines and OpenSearch has 2. Elasticsearch 9.3 reached end of life on Aug 4, 2026. Elasticsearch offers SSPL-1.0, Elastic-2.0 or AGPL-3.0; OpenSearch is open source (Apache-2.0). OSV.dev lists no advisories from the last 12 months for Elasticsearch or OpenSearch.
Last checked against endoflife.date, deps.dev and OSV.dev.
Every value links to its source. Where a row doesn’t apply to one of them, the cell says why.
| Compared on |  Elasticsearch |  OpenSearch |
|---|---|---|
| Support and releases | ||
| Supported release lines | ||
| Latest release | ||
| Releases in the last 12 months | ||
| Security | ||
| Advisories published in the last 12 months | ||
| OpenSSF Scorecard | No Scorecard published | |
| Licence and hosting | ||
| Licence | SSPL-1.0, Elastic-2.0 or AGPL-3.0 Open source under the AGPL-3.0 option Elastic left Apache 2.0 in 2021; the default distribution is under the Elastic License 2.0, which forbids offering Elasticsearch as a managed service. AGPLv3 was added as a source-code option in 2024. | |
| How you run it | Self-hosted, or Elastic Cloud, the vendor’s managed service | Self-hosted, or Amazon OpenSearch Service |
| Adoption | ||
| GitHub stars | ||
| Elasticsearch | OpenSearch |
|---|---|
| Supported release lines | |
| Latest release | |
| Releases in the last 12 months | |
| Elasticsearch | OpenSearch |
|---|---|
| Advisories published in the last 12 months | |
| OpenSSF Scorecard | |
No Scorecard published | |
| Elasticsearch | OpenSearch |
|---|---|
| Licence | |
SSPL-1.0, Elastic-2.0 or AGPL-3.0 Open source under the AGPL-3.0 option Elastic left Apache 2.0 in 2021; the default distribution is under the Elastic License 2.0, which forbids offering Elasticsearch as a managed service. AGPLv3 was added as a source-code option in 2024. | |
| How you run it | |
Self-hosted, or Elastic Cloud, the vendor’s managed service | Self-hosted, or Amazon OpenSearch Service |
| Elasticsearch | OpenSearch |
|---|---|
| GitHub stars | |
Read across for what matters to you. Each answer comes from the data above or the project’s licence and hosting options.
| If you need | Elasticsearch | OpenSearch |
|---|---|---|
| An open-source licence | Yes: Under the AGPL-3.0 option | Yes: Apache-2.0 |
| Someone else runs it for you | Yes: From Elastic Cloud | Yes: From Amazon OpenSearch Service |
| You can run it on your own servers | Yes: Yes, it’s software you install | Yes: Yes, it’s software you install |
| A long support window | 8.19 is supported until Jul 15, 2027 | No end dates published |
| Elasticsearch | OpenSearch |
|---|---|
| An open-source licence | |
Yes: Under the AGPL-3.0 option | Yes: Apache-2.0 |
| Someone else runs it for you | |
Yes: From Elastic Cloud | Yes: From Amazon OpenSearch Service |
| You can run it on your own servers | |
Yes: Yes, it’s software you install | Yes: Yes, it’s software you install |
| A long support window | |
8.19 is supported until Jul 15, 2027 | No end dates published |
Distributed search and analytics engine
Community-driven fork of Elasticsearch
From StackPrism’s curated notes. Pricing isn’t covered here: it changes often, so check each vendor’s pricing page.
OpenSearch started in 2021 as an Apache 2.0 fork of Elasticsearch 7.10.2, after Elastic moved Elasticsearch away from Apache 2.0. The two have diverged since, so APIs and plugins aren’t always interchangeable; the licence and where you plan to host usually decide it.
Release lines and end-of-life dates come from endoflife.date, release counts from deps.dev’s publish dates, and advisories from OSV.dev, counted once per flaw even when it’s listed under several ids, and checked against CISA’s list of vulnerabilities known to be exploited. Status and incident history come from each vendor’s public status feed; licences from each project’s licence file or the vendor’s licensing page, linked in the table.
The data refreshes every few hours and the time it was checked is shown above. There’s no pricing and no overall winner: which one fits depends on your constraints. To see how the versions you actually run hold up, check your repo.
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