Elasticsearch vs Quickwit
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted search engines options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
Elasticsearch
Distributed search and analytics engine
VS
Quickwit
Cloud-native search engine for logs and traces
| Feature | Elasticsearch | Quickwit |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 100 · Excellent | 93 · Excellent |
| Category | Search Engines | Search Engines |
| License | Elastic-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Language | Java | Rust |
| Setup difficulty | Hard | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 2,048 MB | 1,024 MB |
| Deployment | docker, kubernetes, bare-metal | docker, kubernetes, binary |
| GitHub stars | ★ 77,969 | ★ 11,670 |
| First released | 2010 | 2021 |
| Replaces | Algolia, Splunk | Splunk, Elasticsearch |
What are Elasticsearch and Quickwit?
Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine capable of addressing a wide variety of use cases. It stores and indexes large volumes of data for fast full-text and structured search.
- Distributed full-text search
- Aggregations and analytics
- Horizontal scalability
- Rich query DSL
Quickwit
Quickwit is an open-source, cloud-native search engine optimized for log management, distributed tracing and analytics on large datasets stored in object storage. It is designed to be cost efficient at scale.
- Search directly on object storage
- Optimized for logs and traces
- Decoupled compute and storage
- Elasticsearch-compatible API
Elasticsearch vs Quickwit: key differences
Elasticsearch is written in Java, while Quickwit is built with Rust. Licensing differs — Elastic-2.0 for Elasticsearch versus Apache-2.0 for Quickwit. Quickwit is the lighter option, starting around 1,024 MB of RAM against 2,048 MB for Elasticsearch. Elasticsearch is the more established project (first released 2010), while Quickwit arrived in 2021. Elasticsearch has the considerably larger community, at 77,969 GitHub stars versus 11,670.
Why pick each one
Choose Elasticsearch if…
- Extremely powerful and mature
- Huge ecosystem
Watch out for
- Resource intensive
- Complex to tune
Choose Quickwit if…
- Very cost effective at scale
- Modern Rust codebase
Watch out for
- Focused on append-only data
Frequently asked questions
Is Elasticsearch or Quickwit better?
Neither is universally better. Elasticsearch has the larger community, while Quickwit is simpler to set up (medium difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are Elasticsearch and Quickwit free and open-source?
Yes. Elasticsearch is licensed under Elastic-2.0 and Quickwit under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Elasticsearch and Quickwit with Docker?
Elasticsearch: yes. Quickwit: yes.
Which is lighter on resources, Elasticsearch or Quickwit?
Quickwit has the smaller minimum footprint at 1,024 MB of RAM, compared to about 2,048 MB for Elasticsearch. Real-world usage depends on library size, user count, and enabled features.