Quickwit is a free, open source search engines project written in Rust and released under Apache-2.0. It has 11,651 GitHub stars, 597 forks and 815 open issues, and was last pushed 4 hours ago. On this registry it ranks #7 of 8 tracked projects in Search Engines, with 5 head-to-head comparisons available. It gained 36 stars over the last 6 tracked days.

What is Quickwit?

What it is

Quickwit is an open-source search engine written in Rust under the Apache-2.0 license. It is positioned for observability workloads, especially log management and distributed tracing, and it names metrics support as a roadmap item. The project lives in the cloud-native search-engine ecosystem and is designed to search data stored in object storage.

The problem it addresses is searching massive telemetry datasets without tying compute and storage together. Quickwit decouples compute and storage, uses stateless indexers and searchers, and queries cloud storage such as Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage, or compatible services. It exposes an Elasticsearch-compatible API and a RESTful API so existing clients and dashboards can use it as a search backend.

Key capabilities

  • It provides full-text search and aggregation queries for indexed observability data.
  • It offers an Elasticsearch-compatible API for Elasticsearch or OpenSearch clients.
  • It supports schemaless indexing, strict schema indexing, and schemaless analytics.
  • It integrates with Jaeger and OpenTelemetry for logs and traces.
  • It ingests data from Kafka, Kinesis, and Pulsar.
  • It supports multi-tenancy, partitioning, retention policies, and delete tasks for GDPR use cases.
  • It is Kubernetes ready through a Helm chart and exposes a RESTful API.

Who uses it and how

  • Platform teams use it as a log-management backend for telemetry stored in cloud object storage.
  • Observability engineers use it for distributed tracing analysis with Jaeger or Grafana workflows.
  • Teams migrating from Elasticsearch or OpenSearch use the compatible API to test queries, dashboards, and clients against Quickwit.
  • Data engineers use streaming ingestion from Kafka, Kinesis, or Pulsar to index telemetry continuously.

Getting started

The README points to a Quickstart, installation documentation, tutorials for Stack Overflow search and analytics, Grafana trace analytics, and Jaeger distributed tracing, plus a Kubernetes Helm chart for deployment.

When to use it — and when not to

Quickwit fits teams that need cloud-native search over large logs and traces, especially when object storage, Kubernetes, or Elasticsearch-compatible clients are already part of the environment. It is less suitable when metrics support is required today, when full Elasticsearch feature parity is needed, or when high-availability indexing is mandatory without Kafka, because the README states that HA indexing is available only with Kafka. Self-hosters must operate the compute layer, object storage, and ingestion pipelines themselves; the provided facts do not indicate a hosted service or built-in SMTP or database dependency.

project readme (upstream, from github) — read inline

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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

🚀 Quickstart



💡 Features

  • Full-text search and aggregation queries
  • Elasticsearch-compatible API, use Quickwit with any Elasticsearch or OpenSearch client
  • Jaeger-native
  • OTEL-native for logs and traces
  • Schemaless or strict schema indexing
  • Schemaless analytics
  • Sub-second search on cloud storage (Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage, …)
  • Decoupled compute and storage, stateless indexers & searchers
  • Grafana data source
  • Kubernetes ready - See our helm-chart
  • RESTful API

Enterprise ready

  • Multiple data sources Kafka / Kinesis / Pulsar native
  • Multi-tenancy: indexing with many indexes and partitioning
  • Retention policies
  • Delete tasks (for GDPR use cases)
  • Distributed and highly available* engine that scales out in seconds (*HA indexing only with Kafka)

📑 Architecture overview

Quickwit Distributed TracingQuickwit Distributed Tracing

📕 Documentation

📚 Resources

🙋 FAQ

How can I switch from Elasticsearch or OpenSearch to Quickwit?

Quickwit supports a large subset of Elasticsearch/OpenSearch API.

For instance, it has an ES-compatible ingest API to make it easier to migrate your log shippers (Vector, Fluent Bit, Syslog, ...) to Quickwit.

On the search side, the most popular Elasticsearch endpoints, query DSL, and even aggregations are supported.

The list of available endpoints and queries is available here, while the list of supported aggregations is available here.

Let us know if part of the API you are using is missing!

If the client you are using is refusing to connect to Quickwit due to missing headers, you can use the extra_headers option in the node configuration to impersonate any compatible version of Elasticsearch or OpenSearch.

How is Quickwit different from traditional search engines like Elasticsearch or Solr?

The core difference and advantage of Quickwit is its architecture built from the ground to search on cloud storage. We optimized IO paths, revamped the index data structures and made search stateless and sub-second on cloud storage.

How does Quickwit compare to Elastic in terms of cost?

We estimate that Quickwit can be up to 10x cheaper on average than Elastic. To understand how, check out our blog post about searching the web on AWS S3.

What license does Quickwit use?

Quickwit is open-source under the Apache License, Version 2.0 - Apache-2.0.

Is it possible to set up Quickwit for a High Availability (HA)?

HA is available for search, for indexing it's available only with a Kafka source.

🤝 Contribute and spread the word

We are always thrilled to receive contributions: code, documentation, issues, or feedback. Here's how you can help us build the future of log management:

✨ After your contributions are accepted, don't forget to claim your swag by emailing us at [email protected]. Thank you for contributing!

💬 Join Our Community

We welcome everyone to our community! Whether you're contributing code or just saying hello, we'd love to hear from you. Here's how you can connect with us:

Frequently asked questions

Is Quickwit free to use?

Quickwit is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. There is no licence fee and no seat count — you can self-host it or, where the project offers one, pay a vendor for a managed version instead.

What does Quickwit do?

Lightning-fast search for massive datasets

What is Quickwit written in?

Quickwit is primarily written in Rust. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/quickwit-oss/quickwit, and it has 11,651 GitHub stars.