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Comment by foxyv | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, the OpenSearch brand has more value now than Elastic.

I see a couple people on here claiming this, but no data to back it up. Elastic beats out OpenSearch by a wide margin on every metric I've thought to check (gh stars, gh stars rate of increase, number of commits, number of pull requests opened, number of pull requests merged, number of issues, stack overflow questions...). Not a single one shows OpenSearch ahead.

What metric are you using to come to the conclusion that OpenSearch is the more valuable brand?

thats a super one sided set of metrics. it doesn't tell us anything about how many people are actually using one, just how much visible dev activity they have.

I don't have those metrics or an opinion, im just saying that value is based on utilization by a product's target users, not support activities.

> it doesn't tell us anything about how many people are actually using one, just how much visible dev activity they have

Stars and rate of star growth and stack overflow activity are all passable proxies. They're not great, and I'm open to better metrics, but they're what I can find.

Truly, if anyone can give me any metric that shows OpenSearch ahead I'll shut up. I can't find one, and I've looked.

AWS revenue. Internal AWS stats. Open search client pulls (not sure if the client is different now). Opensearch is mainly going to be used on AWS so that won't show up as much in GitHub stars.

None of those metrics measure the value of the brand, so none of those metrics are useful for the question that this thread is about: figuring out if AWS benefits from sticking with the OpenSearch brand.

If I'm right that OpenSearch has a weak brand, Amazon could switch and their internal stats and revenue wouldn't budge.

As a related proxy for market awareness, DB-Engines.com's ranking is a composite index of a number of factors:

• Google search volume and quantity of search result pages (blogs, recipes, etc.)

• Mentions in LinkedIn profiles as a skill

• Number of job post listings as a requisite skill

• Social media mentions

It is a measure of "mindshare" or "share of voice." Not one of market share ($$$) or utilization (TBs under management, etc.).

With that said, in the August 2024 listing:

• Elasticsearch is ranked #8 (of 423 systems tracked), with an index score of 129.83

• OpenSearch is ranked #35, with an index score of 16.47

This would make OpenSearch about an eighth as prevalent.

Relevant, the curves tell a different story: https://db-engines.com/en/ranking_trend/system/Elasticsearch...

A big question is New + Churning installs. I'd expect a scary portion of the New, and inherently slower rate of Churn are heading to OS instead ES. The curves support that: note that ES isn't substantively growing on that chart. Anecdotally, we see most new installs as leaning to OS in the security industry, which is one of the top money makers for ES/OS.

Yes, exactly. I often do comparative results like this to see where there is "momentum."

Opensearch is definitely coming on strong.

For one, we don't have to pay for basic amenities like security and alerts. To heck with gouging the customer for basic feature sets. Aws have their faults, but enabling teams to get the whole elastic experience without the weird nickle and diming is a blessing. Good on Amazon and boo elastic.

This is a reason why you prefer it but not evidence that the brand has overtaken Elastic's.

This evidence can only come from financial accounting. Amazon does not report OpenSearch results separately so you’re looking for data that does not exist in a public form. It’s a waste of time.

> This evidence can only come from financial accounting.

That's not true—we're talking about brand value, not financial value of the product. If AWS switched over to offering ElasticSearch again (not that they will) and ditched OpenSearch, I have no reason to believe that their financial numbers would go down a bit.

Brand value is nearly impossible to measure, but to the extent that you can it'd be by measuring perception among those outside the company, not through an accounting of the company's actual revenue.

Think of it this way: the brand LENRUE [0] is worth approximately zero. The company that makes these products could rebrand tomorrow and their revenue stream wouldn't take a hit in the slightest. But the company presumably actually makes some amount of money.

For Elastic vs OpenSearch, the brand value of the two products should be loosely comparable by looking at some measures of public perceptions, and I can't find any measurement that would suggest OpenSearch is in the lead.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/stores/LENRUE/page/24E9713E-AC7E-4269...

Louie.ai team talks to a lot of sec teams, and new projects generally prefer OS bc openness, and a lot of migrations. Think MSPs etc.

Anecdata, but very real.

interesting. I've heard of ElasticSearch a gazillion times and this is the first time I've heard of "OpenSearch", and I've also been using AWS since it came out basically.

I'm basing it off my own experience with managers, developers, and sysadmins. No one wants Elastic Search over Open Search. We're spending all our money on Open Search. Whenever I mention Elastic Search I may as well have just farted. Everyone hates the support and enterprise licensing model. We already pay for AWS support anyways so why not use their fork? Why add yet another vendor to our tech stack?

I think it's nuanced. I'm currently managing an engineering team on an interim basis. During standup I noticed that most engineers were talking about 'elastic' or 'elasticsearch' but one was talking about opensearch. I asked them to clarify that for me and they told me that they transitioned to AWS opensearch but still use the old name for the product often - that might point to the strength of the Elastic brand.

"Elasticsearch" seems to be often referred to as a technology, as in ELK stack, rather than as in "Elastic" the company.

Please explain. This isn't obvious to me.

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