Elasticsearch

Judgement

What it is

Building block

What it does

A distributed search and analytics engine for full-text search, logs, metrics and vector search, the core of the Elastic Stack.

Adopt it when

You need full-text search or log analytics at scale and want Elastic's features and managed cloud.

Watch out

Licensing has changed several times (now including AGPL as an option), and clusters are demanding to operate.

Ready for

Production-ready

Runs as

Self-hosted server and cloud service

Built with

Java and Lucene

How established

Established: started 16 years ago, latest release v9.5.6.

What the license allows

GitHub could not read the license. Check it in the repository before reusing any code.

Judged on 2026-11-03 from the project's README and GitHub data. The license and age lines are worked out directly.

Built from

Follow it down: Elasticsearch → JDK → LLVM project → runs on a microchip

How compilers were built, back to punched paper tape

Built on Elasticsearch: 5 projects

1. 1
   Bagisto bagisto

   Open Source eCommerce & Multi-Vendor Marketplace Platform Built with Laravel for Enterprise-Scale Commerce, Supporting 10M+ SKUs

   Complete system Production-ready A business with PHP developers wants a self-hosted store or marketplace it can customise in Laravel.

   ★ 28k MIT PHP Active, pushed 10 days ago
2. 2
   Elasticsearch-dump elasticsearch-dump

   Import and export tools for elasticsearch & opensearch

   Developer tool Production-ready You need to copy or back up indices between clusters or to files without setting up snapshot repositories.

   ★ 7.9k Apache-2.0 JavaScript Active, pushed yesterday
3. 3
   NewsBlur samuelclay

   NewsBlur is a personal news reader that brings people together to talk about the world. A new sound of an old instrument.

   Complete system Production-ready You want a mature hosted feed reader with filtering, or want to study or self-host the full stack.

   ★ 7.7k MIT HTML Active, pushed today
4. 4
   Mthc pe3zx

   All-in-one bundle of MISP, TheHive and Cortex

   Template or starter Experimental Only for a quick lab setup of that security stack.

   ★ 168 MIT Quiet, pushed 4 years ago
5. 5
   ShoMon kaansk

   Shodan Monitoring integration for TheHive.

   Integration Usable A security team already uses TheHive and Shodan Monitor on its own IP ranges.

   ★ 129 MIT Go Quiet, pushed 2 years ago

Open-source alternatives to Elasticsearch

1. 1
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2. 2
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4. 4
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   ★ 117k MIT JavaScript Active, pushed today
5. 5
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   Framework or platform Production-ready You train or fine-tune neural networks.

   ★ 105k See repository Python Active, pushed today
7. 7
   Tailwindcss tailwindlabs

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   Framework or platform Production-ready You build UIs in a component framework and want consistent styling without writing custom CSS files.

   ★ 98k MIT TypeScript Active, pushed today
8. 8
   Gin gin-gonic

   Gin is a high-performance HTTP web framework written in Go. It provides a Martini-like API but with significantly better performance—up to 40 times faster—thanks to httprouter. Gin is designed for building REST APIs, web applications, and microservices.

   Framework or platform Production-ready You build HTTP APIs in Go and want the most widely used framework with many examples.

   ★ 89k MIT Go Active, pushed 24 days ago