Anyone know if it's still a drop in replacement for Elasticsearch? And how does it compare on performance and features?
There are some exceptions to this and vector search would be one of those. The feature was added post fork. There are a few other things of course. E.g. search_after works slightly different on both. My client works around that. And there are a lot of newer features on both sides that are annoyingly different. Both have some sql querying capabilities now but they both have their own take on that.
Elastic still has the edge on features IMHO. Especially Kibana has a lot more features than Amazon's fork. And on the aggregation front, Elastic has done quite a bit of feature and optimization work in the last few years (that's what powers the dashboards). For performance it depends what you do. But they both heavily lean on Lucene which remains the open source search library both products use. Elastic cloud is a bit better than opensearch in AWS from what I've seen. If you self host and tune, both should be very similar.
Elastic also just tagged version 9.0, which uses the same new version of Lucene as Opensearch 3.0. I have support for both new versions in my client already (added that a few weeks ago). It now works with Elasticsearch v7, 8, and 9 and Opensearch 1,2, & 3.
A lot of my consulting clients seem to prefer Opensearch lately. That's mainly because of the less complicated licensing and the AWS support. If you have a legacy Elasticsearch setup switching it to Opensearch should be doable (depending on what you use). But expect to reindex all your data. I don't think a direct migration is possible. If you use Elastic's client libraries, you may need to switch to Opensearch specific ones. This is generally a bit painful (package names, feature differences, etc.). That's why I created kt-search a few years ago.
If you're just using the standard document ingestion and search stuff, yeah, they're mostly compatible. But the fancier features that were part of the paid version in the past or have been recently developed are either not compatible or missing.
As you point out it was forked a number of years ago so it started from the same place (7.10). Elasticsearch is now on 9.0+ and has 27,000 more commits than OpenSearch. So I doubt it is a drop-in replacement anymore.
I have no idea how many of those 27K commits are key features, but it is clear divergence.
My company did a fairly comprehensive benchmark of the two products [0] if you are interested in comparing performances.
[0] https://blog.trailofbits.com/2025/03/06/benchmarking-opensea...
1.x is compatible with ES 7.10
OpenSearch was once a personal search results aggregator conceived at A9 (Amazon's Silicon Valley subsidiary): https://github.com/dewitt/opensearch