Why Elasticsearch Lost Its Crown to OpenSearch: Licensing Wars and Cloud Shifts

Most Popular Full‑Text Search Engine

Elasticsearch is a widely used open‑source distributed full‑text search engine built on Apache Lucene and released under the Apache 2.0 license. Its powerful search capabilities, high scalability, and rich analytics have made it extremely popular worldwide.

Since its open‑source launch in 2010, Elasticsearch has consistently topped the DB‑Engines popularity ranking for search‑engine databases.

Elastic and AWS Events

Elastic, founded in 2012, became a Silicon‑Valley unicorn. As cloud computing grew, SaaS models gained traction, and many cloud providers began offering Elasticsearch as a managed service without contributing back to the open‑source project.

In response, Elastic altered the licensing of Elasticsearch and Kibana from Apache 2.0 (ALv2) to a dual‑license model (SSPL & Elastic license), limiting unlicensed SaaS use.

AWS, instead of partnering with Elastic, launched Open Distro for Elasticsearch in 2019 and later introduced the OpenSearch project in 2021, replacing its original Elasticsearch service.

Timeline

Feb 2010 – Elastic releases Elasticsearch under Apache 2.0.

2018‑2019 – Elastic changes the license of Kibana and Elasticsearch (ALv2 → SSPL & Elastic dual‑license), ending open‑source releases after version 7.10.2.

Mar 2019 – AWS launches Open Distro for Elasticsearch, a fully open‑source distribution.

Apr 2021 – AWS announces OpenSearch, forking from 7.10.2 and re‑engineering plugins.

Sep 2021 – AWS rebrands its managed service to AWS OpenSearch Service.

ELv2 vs. SSPL Licenses

ELv2 (Elastic License v2) permits free use, modification, and redistribution but prohibits offering the product as a hosted service, bypassing license‑key features, or removing license notices.

SSPL (Server Side Public License) from MongoDB requires any provider offering the software as a service to open‑source the entire service stack under SSPL.

Impact and Choices

Elastic’s license change does not affect individual users but restricts cloud providers from delivering Elasticsearch as a SaaS offering without a commercial agreement. Providers face two options:

Plan A – Obtain a commercial license from Elastic and cooperate closely.

Plan B – Continue using the last OSS version under ALv2 or migrate to alternatives.

Cloud vendors that have partnered with Elastic include Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, Tencent, and Clever Cloud.

New Options?

OpenSearch is a community‑driven open‑source search and analytics suite derived from Elasticsearch 7.10.2 and Kibana 7.10.2. It consists of the OpenSearch engine and OpenSearch Dashboards, enabling easy ingestion, protection, search, aggregation, visualization, and analysis of data.

Evolution

Initially, Open Distro added features to Elasticsearch and Kibana; now OpenSearch replaces all Elasticsearch references and continues to incorporate Open Distro functionality while remaining fully open source under AWS support.

Alternatives

Both Elasticsearch and OpenSearch provide comparable big‑data solutions with similar underlying implementations. OpenSearch matches all features of the open‑source Elasticsearch and adds commercial‑grade capabilities comparable to Elasticsearch X‑Pack.

Core user needs—search, security, monitoring, alerting, cross‑cluster replication—are satisfied by either platform.

Latest Versions

Since the OpenSearch project launch in April 2021, the suite has progressed to version 1.1.0, introducing features such as shard‑level post‑processing, enhanced observability, FAISS‑based k‑NN plugin improvements, anomaly detection signals, and expanded cross‑cluster replication.

Elastic’s View on OpenSearch

Elastic’s website addresses common questions about OpenSearch, explaining its origins as a fork from Elasticsearch and Kibana and clarifying feature differences.

Outlook

In the diverse cloud ecosystems, developers will adopt different models to meet product requirements. Elasticsearch is likely to remain a dominant force, while OpenSearch, backed by AWS, is poised to become a strong alternative, especially where licensing constraints limit the use of newer Elasticsearch versions.