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Hosted search-as-a-service platform delivering real-time, full-text search for apps and websites
Discover top open-source software, updated regularly with real-world adoption signals.

Distributed search and analytics engine for production-scale workloads
Elasticsearch is a scalable, distributed search engine and vector database optimized for speed and relevance across massive datasets, powering full-text search, logs, metrics, APM, and AI applications.

Elasticsearch is a distributed search and analytics engine designed for production-scale workloads. It serves as a scalable data store and vector database, delivering near real-time search performance across massive datasets. As the foundation of Elastic's Stack platform, it powers full-text search, log aggregation, metrics analysis, application performance monitoring (APM), security logs, and generative AI integrations.
Elasticsearch indexes structured and unstructured data—text, numerical values, and geospatial information—optimizing storage for fast retrieval. Documents are indexed and available for search in near real-time. Users interact with Elasticsearch through REST APIs, language clients (Python, Java, JavaScript, etc.), or Kibana's Dev Tools Console. Data can be added as single documents or in bulk using newline-delimited JSON.
Deployment options include managed Elasticsearch Service on Elastic Cloud or self-managed installations. For local development, the start-local script provisions Dockerized Elasticsearch and Kibana instances with basic authentication and a one-month trial license that includes all features before reverting to the Basic tier.
Elasticsearch serves developers building search-driven applications, DevOps teams managing observability pipelines, data engineers handling analytics workloads, and organizations integrating vector search for AI use cases.
When teams consider Elasticsearch, these hosted platforms usually appear on the same shortlist.

Hosted search-as-a-service platform delivering real-time, full-text search for apps and websites

Managed search service to index and query text & structured data

AI-powered enterprise search service that indexes and searches across various content repositories with natural language queries
Looking for a hosted option? These are the services engineering teams benchmark against before choosing open source.
Centralized Log Management
Aggregate logs from distributed services into Elasticsearch, enabling real-time search, filtering, and anomaly detection across infrastructure and application layers.
E-commerce Product Search
Deliver fast, relevant full-text search with faceted filtering and typo tolerance, improving customer experience and conversion rates on product catalogs.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
Ingest security logs and events at scale, perform correlation analysis, and detect threats in near real-time with customizable alerting rules.
AI-Powered Semantic Search
Leverage vector database capabilities to implement semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for generative AI applications.
Elasticsearch is the core search and analytics engine. The Elastic Stack includes Elasticsearch plus Kibana (visualization), Logstash (data ingestion), and Beats (lightweight shippers) for a complete observability and search platform.
Yes. Elasticsearch offers a Free and open Basic tier with core search and analytics features. A one-month trial provides access to advanced features; after expiration, the license reverts to Basic unless upgraded.
Use the REST API directly via HTTP clients like curl, or integrate official language clients (Python, Java, JavaScript, Go, etc.) with basic authentication or API keys for programmatic access.
No. The start-local script is designed exclusively for local development and testing. It disables HTTPS and uses basic authentication, making it unsuitable for production deployments.
Deploy Elasticsearch as a managed service on Elastic Cloud for simplified operations, or self-host by downloading binaries and managing infrastructure yourself. Local Docker setups are available for development.
Project at a glance
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