Quickwit vs OpenSearch Dashboards
log search at scale — Rust storage-decoupled vs. JVM cluster
| Quickwit | OpenSearch Dashboards | |
|---|---|---|
| Summary | Rust search engine for logs and traces with sub-second queries directly against S3-compatible object storage. | Apache-2.0 fork of Kibana, paired with OpenSearch. The de-facto self-hosted alternative to Elastic for logs visualization. |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Language | Rust | TypeScript |
| GitHub stars (approx) | 11000 | 2000 |
| Categories | logs, traces | logs |
| Replaces SaaS | datadog, splunk, new-relic | splunk, datadog |
| Self-host deployment | single binary, docker, kubernetes helm | docker, kubernetes helm, tarball |
| Commercial hosted option | no / self-host only | yes (vendor-run) |
| Repository | https://github.com/quickwit-oss/quickwit | https://github.com/opensearch-project/OpenSearch-Dashboards |
| Freshness checked | 2026-05-17 | 2026-05-17 |
When to prefer Quickwit
You want full-text log search without running a JVM cluster. Quickwit is written in Rust, decouples compute from storage (data lives on S3), and has dramatically lower memory overhead than an Elasticsearch or OpenSearch cluster of comparable ingest.
When to prefer OpenSearch Dashboards
You need the full Kibana-derived dashboard ecosystem, mature alerting, SIEM features, and the broadest set of existing visualizations. OpenSearch Dashboards is the most feature-complete log UI in OSS, at the cost of a JVM cluster to operate.