ElasticSearch vs OpenSearch

Both are self-hosted search engines projects. This page compares how well each one is actually maintained — the part you cannot see from a feature list.

ElasticSearch scores 97 against OpenSearch's 88, putting it slightly ahead on the strength of a higher commit volume. That measures project health, not feature fit — OpenSearch may still be the right choice if it does what you need.

	ElasticSearch	OpenSearch
Health score	97/100	88/100
Commits (11 mo)	12804	1366
Commits (last 3 mo)	4443	441
Stars	78k	14k
Latest release	23 Sept 2026	5 Aug 2026
Licence	SSPL-1.0	Apache-2.0
Built with	Java	Java, Docker, K8S, deb
Typical RAM	2 GB	2 GB

ElasticSearch

Distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine.

97/100

Thriving

High commit volume, frequent releases and growing activity.

Maintenance 40/40

Releases 25/25

Community 20/20

Momentum 12/15

Commit activity in the top 1% of tracked projects; popularity in the top 1%. How this is calculated.

Commits, last 11 months

OpenSearch

Distributed and RESTful search engine.

88/100

Thriving

High commit volume, frequent releases and growing activity.

Maintenance 34/40

Releases 25/25

Community 17/20

Momentum 12/15

Commit activity more than 85% of tracked projects; popularity more than 83%. How this is calculated.

Commits, last 11 months

How to read this

Everything above is measured, not opinion: commit counts and release dates come from the public repositories, and the health score ranks each project against all 1352 projects we track. Read the full method.

What this comparison deliberately does not do is tell you which has the better feature set. Maintenance health tells you which project will still be receiving security fixes in two years. Decide that first, then compare features on the projects that survive the filter.

See every option in this category: self-hosted search engines.