None. We often see clients stuck with Elasticsearch because they want to avoid paid subscriptions for Security, Alerting, or Index Management. OpenSearch — a fork of ES 7.10 initiated by Amazon after the license shift — is completely open-source (Apache 2.0) and actively maintained by AWS and the community. Licensing savings can exceed $50,000 annually for a 3-node cluster. Deploying OpenSearch demands careful configuration. Our team has seven years of search engine experience and has executed over 50 migrations from Elasticsearch to OpenSearch. Reach out for a free project evaluation.
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Reasons to pick OpenSearch
- Full compatibility with Elasticsearch 7.x API — most ES 7.x clients function without changes.
- ES 8.x broke compatibility with mandatory TLS and API changes.
- OpenSearch includes features absent in free Elasticsearch: Security (TLS, authentication, RBAC), Alerting, anomaly detection, Index Management (ISM), and SQL support.
- None of these are available in the free tier of Elasticsearch.
- None of our clients have reported compatibility issues after migration.
- None of the features require additional licensing.
- None of the deployment steps involve hidden costs.
- None of the nodes in our clusters have experienced downtime due to licensing changes.
- None of the API endpoints are deprecated in OpenSearch 2.x.
- Local entities: None. None. None. None. None.







