Quickwit
Open-source, cloud-native search engine for logs and traces on object storage.
Acquired — still operating
Acquired by Datadog in January 2025; the team builds with Datadog while open-source releases continue under Apache-2.0.
About
Quickwit is an open-source search engine purpose-built for observability data, written in Rust and licensed under Apache-2.0. Its defining bet is architectural: it searches petabytes of logs and traces directly on object storage (S3, GCS, Azure Blob) with decoupled compute and storage, delivering sub-second full-text search and aggregations at a fraction of the infrastructure cost of clustered Elasticsearch. It speaks a large subset of the Elasticsearch API for easy migration, is OTEL-native for logs and traces, and integrates with Jaeger and Grafana.
The project has 11,723 GitHub stars (quickwit-oss/quickwit) and was acquired by Datadog in January 2025; the team is now building with Datadog while continuing open-source releases under Apache-2.0. Founded in 2020 by search specialists Paul Masurel, Adrien Guillo, and Francois Massot. The repo is active (pushed October 2026) and not archived.
What it can do
- Sub-second full-text search directly on object storage
- Decoupled compute and storage architecture
- Large subset of the Elasticsearch/OpenSearch API
- OTEL-native logs and traces ingestion
- Kafka, Kinesis, Pulsar native sources
- Jaeger and Grafana integrations
- Multi-tenancy, retention policies, delete tasks
- Distributed ingest and cardinality aggregations
Setup
- Install Quickwit via the binary, Docker, or package manager (see quickwit.io docs).
- Create an index and configure ingestion from Kafka, Kinesis, Pulsar, or any Elasticsearch-compatible shipper (Vector, Fluent Bit).
- Point data at your S3/GCS/Azure bucket as the storage backend.
- Query via the Elasticsearch-compatible API, the built-in UI, or Grafana.
Prerequisites
Object storage (S3, GCS, or Azure Blob); a log shipper or OTEL collector for ingestion.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 8/10
Scored 8/10 (TIER verified, metrics-v1). Evidence: 11,723 GitHub stars, 2k+ forks, Apache-2.0, repo pushed 2026-10-15 and not archived (live API check); acquired by Datadog Jan 2025 with continued open-source releases promised; OTEL-native and Elasticsearch-compatible per docs. Strengths: strong OSS traction, sound object-storage architecture, credible acquirer commitment. Docked for: (1) roadmap now steered by Datadog integration priorities; (2) still narrower than full observability suites (logs/traces focus). License: Apache-2.0.
★ 11,723 GitHub stars
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 7.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 7.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 9.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 7.0/10
- · quickwit-oss/quickwit: 11,723 stars, not archived, pushed 2026-10-15 (live GitHub API)
- · Open-source Rust search engine on object storage; Elasticsearch-compatible API; OTEL-native
- · Acquired by Datadog Jan 2025; team integrating while OSS releases continue under Apache-2.0
- · Roadmap now steered by Datadog integration priorities; logs/traces focus, narrower than full suites
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.