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What's the Difference Between Amazon CloudSearch and Amazon OpenSearch?

Compare Amazon CloudSearch and Amazon OpenSearch side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.

Compare side-by-side

Comparisons
Amazon CloudSearch
Amazon OpenSearch
Category

Analytics, Search

Analytics, Search & log analytics
Description

Managed search service for setting up, managing, and scaling a search solution for your website or application.

Real-time search, observability, and security analytics
Best for
  • Website search
  • Document search
  • E-commerce search
  • Log search
  • Log analytics
  • Full-text search
  • Application monitoring
  • Security analytics
  • Clickstream analytics
Key features
  • Auto scaling
  • Faceting
  • Highlighting
  • Geospatial search
  • Multiple languages
  • OpenSearch Serverless
  • Dashboards
  • Anomaly detection
  • Alerting
  • Cross-cluster search
Pricing model

Pay per search instance hour + data transfer

Pay per instance hour + storage
Free tier

No

Yes
Expert take

“CloudSearch provides managed search with auto-scaling and multi-AZ. For new projects, OpenSearch offers more flexibility, but CloudSearch remains simpler for basic full-text search needs.”
— Riku Kobayashi, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

“OpenSearch is the right choice when you need full-text search with relevance scoring, log analytics with dashboards, or both in one cluster. OpenSearch Serverless removes capacity planning; for predictable workloads, provisioned clusters with UltraWarm tiering optimize cost.”
— Oleksii Bebych, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]
Product page

Learn more about Amazon CloudSearch »

Learn more about Amazon OpenSearch »

When to use Amazon CloudSearch or Amazon OpenSearch

Use Amazon CloudSearch when:

  • Website search
  • Document search
  • E-commerce search
  • Log search

Learn more about Amazon CloudSearch »

Use Amazon OpenSearch when:

  • Log analytics
  • Full-text search
  • Application monitoring
  • Security analytics
  • Clickstream analytics

Learn more about Amazon OpenSearch »

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