What OpenSearch is
OpenSearch was created as a community fork of Elasticsearch after Elastic switched its licence from Apache 2.0 to licensing models of its own in 2021. The project is licensed entirely under Apache 2.0; since September 2024 it has been run by the OpenSearch Software Foundation, a project of the Linux Foundation. The current major version is 3.x, generally available since May 2025; the latest minor release, 3.9.0, came out on 29 September 2026. The 2.x line is maintained with 2.19 until OpenSearch 4.0 is released, and 1.x has reached its end of life.
For a shop, OpenSearch is a service of its own alongside the database and the cache. It holds an index — a searchable copy of the catalogue data — and answers search, filters, sorting and suggestions from it. Because the index is built from the shop data, it can be rebuilt at any time, which makes migrations and version changes plannable. What mapping, data quality and weighting mean for the result list is described on our Elasticsearch page; the two systems share the same foundations.
How we work with OpenSearch
In Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce a search engine is an installation requirement, and from version 2.4.9 only OpenSearch 3 qualifies. In Shopware 6, OpenSearch handles the searches marked for it — by default product search, product listings and search suggestions — connected through environment variables and indexed via the message queue; without a search service, Shopware otherwise searches through the database. We move existing shops over from Elasticsearch, always on a staging system with a copy of the live data first, and tune synonyms, weighting and filters against real search queries.
OpenSearch runs on our own servers, Proxmox VE clusters in the Hetzner data centre in Falkenstein, inside the environment of the shop it belongs to. That includes snapshots of the indices, monitoring of health, memory, response times and indexing, and updates in the agreed maintenance windows; major upgrades such as OpenSearch 2 to 3 are planned as a project of their own. Maintenance runs under a service level agreement — 24, 8 or 4 hours’ response time, booked for a year. Configuration and custom code sit in your repository.
Limits: when OpenSearch is not needed
With a small catalogue, database search in Shopware is enough. A search service of its own costs memory, operation and attention — permanently, not just at setup. In that case we say so and build the shop that way, with well-kept product names and clear categories instead of a service the range does not need. With Magento the question does not arise: Magento 2.4 cannot be installed without a search engine.
The second limit concerns expectations. OpenSearch answers queries quickly, but only as well as data and settings allow: if synonyms are missing, attributes exist only as running text or fields are weighted wrongly, the new service delivers the wrong results too. A move from Elasticsearch to OpenSearch therefore does not improve search by itself. It is, however, a good moment to do so, because the index is being rebuilt anyway.