Open-source alternatives to Elasticsearch
4 open-source projects are offered as replacements for Elasticsearch. Sonic is the most starred. Running one yourself trades the subscription for your own hosting and upkeep, so the table below leads with what decides that trade: whether the project is alive, what its licence lets a business do, and whether there is a container command to start from.
Side by side
| Project | Stars | Activity | Licence | Self-host | Language |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Sonic | 21,364 | Active | Weak copyleft | Docker | Rust |
 Manticoresearch | 12,063 | Active | Copyleft | Docker | C++ |
 Quickwit | 11,725 | Active | Permissive | ○ | Rust |
 Matano | 1,700 | Quiet | Permissive | ○ | Rust |
Each one, briefly
- Sonic21,364 stars · weak copyleft · active
🦔 Fast, lightweight & schema-less search backend. An alternative to Elasticsearch that runs on a few MBs of RAM.
- Manticoresearch12,063 stars · copyleft · active
Open-source search database for full-text, vector, and hybrid search with real-time indexing and SQL.
- Quickwit11,725 stars · permissive · active
Cloud-native OSS search engine for observability
Also replaces Splunk
- Matano1,700 stars · permissive · quiet
Open source security data lake for threat hunting, detection & response, and cybersecurity analytics at petabyte scale on AWS
Also replaces Panther, Splunk
Where this comes from
Which projects are offered against Elasticsearch comes from opensourcealternative.to, re-read weekly. Every figure in the table is read from the project’s own repository. We have not run these projects, and we hold no price for Elasticsearch. Browse every open-source alternative.