head to head · open source
Elasticsearch vs Quickwit
Elasticsearch has 78,462 GitHub stars, 26,239 forks, 6,059 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Quickwit has 11,760 stars, 623 forks, 815 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Elasticsearch leads on adoption by 567% (78,462 vs 11,760 stars). Elasticsearch is written in Java under a custom or non-standard licence; Quickwit is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Elasticsearch has attracted 33% as many forks as stars, Quickwit 5%. Elasticsearch was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (search-engine), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Elasticsearch | Quickwit | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 12K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 26K | ⑂ 623 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Elasticsearch if
- You weight community size — 78K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Quickwit if
- You want the Quickwit feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and Quickwit fits your workflow better
About Elasticsearch
= Elasticsearch Elasticsearch is a distributed search and analytics engine, scalable data store and vector database optimized for speed and relevance on production scale workloads. Elasticsearch is the foundation of Elastic's open Stack platform. Search in near real time over massive datasets, perform vector searches, integrate with generative AI applications, and much more. Use cases enabled by Elasticsearch include: Augmented Generation (RAG)] search] Full text search Logs Metrics Application performance monitoring (APM) Security logs \... and more! To learn more about Elasticsearch's features and…
read the full Elasticsearch overview →
About Quickwit
Open source search engine for observability (logs, traces, and soon metrics!). Quickstart Docs Tutorials Chat Download We just released Quickwit 0.8! Read the blog post to learn about the latest powerful features! Quickwit is the fastest search engine on cloud storage. It's the perfect fit for observability use cases Log management Distributed tracing Metrics support is on the roadmap 🚀 Quickstart Search and analytics on Stack Overflow dataset Trace analytics with Grafana Distributed tracing with Jaeger 💡 Features Full text search and aggregation queries Elasticsearch compatible API, use Quickwit with any…
read the full Quickwit overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Elasticsearch or Quickwit more popular?
Elasticsearch has 78,462 GitHub stars and Quickwit has 11,760. Elasticsearch has the larger community by that measure.
Are Elasticsearch and Quickwit free?
Both are open source. Elasticsearch has no licence declared in this registry, and Quickwit is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Elasticsearch and Quickwit?
Elasticsearch is written in Java and Quickwit in Rust. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Elasticsearch or Quickwit?
Choose Elasticsearch if you want the larger community (78,462 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose Quickwit if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.