Quickwit
Cloud-native search engine for logs and traces
About Quickwit
Quickwit is an open-source, cloud-native search engine designed for observability data including logs and traces. Built in Rust, it executes complex search and analytics queries directly on object storage with sub-second latency, offering up to 10x cost savings compared to Elasticsearch.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Up to 10x cheaper than Elasticsearch for log search and analytics
- Built in Rust for high performance with low resource consumption
- Decoupled compute and storage architecture reduces infrastructure costs
- Open-source with no vendor lock-in
- Native OpenTelemetry support for modern observability stacks
- Schemaless indexing handles arbitrary JSON without predefined schemas
- Sub-second query latency even on object storage
Cons
- Smaller community compared to Elasticsearch or Datadog
- Primarily focused on log and trace data, not general-purpose search
- Limited integrations compared to established observability platforms
- Acquired by Datadog in 2025, future open-source direction uncertain
- No official managed cloud offering from Quickwit directly
Key Features
Sub-Second Search on Object Storage
Executes complex search and analytics queries directly on cloud object storage (S3, MinIO, Ceph) with sub-second latency
Schemaless Indexing
Index JSON documents with an arbitrary number of fields without defining a schema upfront
Real-Time Indexing
Ingest and index data in real-time with support for distributed queues like Apache Kafka and Amazon Kinesis
Horizontal Scalability
Scale horizontally to handle petabytes of data without significant architectural changes
Multi-Tenancy
Built-in multi-tenancy support for isolating data across different teams or customers
Retention Policies & GDPR Deletions
Configure automatic data retention policies and perform GDPR-compliant data deletions
OpenTelemetry Native
Native support for OpenTelemetry protocols for ingesting logs and traces
Elasticsearch-Compatible API
Drop-in replacement with Elasticsearch-compatible query API for easy migration
Kubernetes Deployment
Deploy on Kubernetes with Helm charts or on bare metal with stateless indexer and searcher nodes
High Availability
Stateless architecture with decoupled compute and storage ensures high availability and fault tolerance
Pricing
- Full search engine capabilities
- Object storage integration (S3, MinIO, Ceph)
- Schemaless indexing
- OpenTelemetry support
- Elasticsearch-compatible API
- Kubernetes deployment
- Community support
Best For
Log Management at Scale
Store and search petabytes of log data on cheap object storage while maintaining sub-second query performance
Distributed Tracing
Ingest and analyze OpenTelemetry traces for debugging microservices architectures
Cost-Effective Observability
Replace expensive Elasticsearch or Datadog deployments with a solution that can reduce costs by up to 90%
Security Analytics
Index and search security logs and audit trails with retention policies and GDPR-compliant deletion capabilities
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