Editorial take
Why it stands out
Serverless min OCUs run 24/7—multiply hourly rate by 730 hours before calling it cheap.
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Tool profile
Open search and analytics engine for logs, monitoring, security data, and full-text queries.
Centralized logging on AWS with OpenSearch Service
OpenSearch is an Apache 2.0 search and analytics suite (OpenSearch Dashboards, plugins). Your license cost is $0; spend is infrastructure and operator time.
AWS OpenSearch Service (March 2026 pricing page) offers managed clusters with instance-hour and storage charges, Serverless collections billed in OpenSearch Compute Units (OCUs) for indexing and search separately, per-second billing, and minimum OCUs (often two OCUs for redundancy on the first collection—1 OCU indexing pair and 1 OCU search pair—dev-test mode can halve to 0.5 plus 0.5 per docs). Published regional tables include about $0.0065 per OCU-hour for standard Serverless OCUs in US East (N. Virginia) and Ohio on the fetched grid.
OpenSearch Ingestion, vector GPU OCUs, semantic enrichment, and Direct Query add additional OCU products—each has its own paragraph and rate card on the same page.
Quick fit
Editorial take
Serverless min OCUs run 24/7—multiply hourly rate by 730 hours before calling it cheap.
What it does well
Primary use cases
Fit notes
Compare with
Pressure-test this pick against nearby alternatives.
Pricing snapshot
OpenSearch itself is free open-source software. AWS OpenSearch Service managed clusters bill by instance hours, storage, and transfer. OpenSearch Serverless bills indexing/search compute in OCU-hours plus storage, and AWS says the first collection is billed with a minimum of 2 OCUs by default, or 1 OCU total in dev-test mode.
Alation
PaidEnterprise data catalog
Enterprise data intelligence and catalog platform for search, governance, trust, and AI-ready knowledge layers over organizational data.
Choose Alation when the buying problem is enterprise trust, governance, and discoverability across data assets.
