What is Quickwit used for?

Quickwit is a cloud-native open-source search engine for observability data, built in Rust to index logs and traces on object storage with an Elasticsearch-compatible API. It is a good fit for centralized log management, distributed tracing storage with Jaeger and cutting log storage costs with object storage.

Is Quickwit open source?

Yes. Quickwit is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at quickwit-oss/quickwit and is written mainly in Rust.

Yes. Quickwit is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host Quickwit?

Yes. Quickwit can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What is Quickwit an alternative to?

Quickwit is an open-source alternative to Datadog, Splunk, Elastic and Sumo Logic. Other open-source alternatives to Datadog include OpenObserve, Grafana Loki and SigNoz.

Is Quickwit actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Quickwit was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v0.9.1, published on 23 September 2026. The project has 12k stars on GitHub.

Quickwit: open-source alternative to Datadog, Splunk

About Quickwit

Quickwit is an open-source, cloud-native search engine designed for observability, covering log management and distributed tracing, with metrics support listed on the roadmap. It is written in Rust, builds on the Tantivy search library, and is meant to search large volumes of data kept in cheap object storage.

It provides full-text search and aggregation queries, schemaless or strict-schema indexing, and a RESTful API that is compatible with a large subset of the Elasticsearch and OpenSearch APIs, so existing clients can often be reused. It is native to Jaeger and OpenTelemetry, works as a Grafana data source and can ingest from Kafka, Kinesis and Pulsar. Compute and storage are decoupled, with stateless indexers and searchers, and data can sit on Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage or Google Cloud Storage.

Operational features include multi-tenancy with many indexes, partitioning, retention policies and delete tasks for GDPR use cases, and a Helm chart for Kubernetes. Quickwit is licensed under Apache-2.0 and you run it yourself. It suits teams looking for lower-cost log and trace storage with a familiar search API.

Key features

Full-text search and aggregation queries
API compatible with Elasticsearch clients
Native Jaeger and OpenTelemetry support
Search directly on cloud object storage
Decoupled compute and storage
Ingestion from Kafka, Kinesis and Pulsar
Retention policies and GDPR delete tasks
Helm chart for Kubernetes

Good fit for

→Centralized log management
→Distributed tracing storage with Jaeger
→Cutting log storage costs with object storage

Built with: Rust
Tags: observability; log-management; distributed-tracing; search-engine; rust; opentelemetry; object-storage; cloud-native

Quickwit: questions and answers

What is Quickwit used for?: Quickwit is a cloud-native open-source search engine for observability data, built in Rust to index logs and traces on object storage with an Elasticsearch-compatible API. It is a good fit for centralized log management, distributed tracing storage with Jaeger and cutting log storage costs with object storage.
Is Quickwit open source?: Yes. Quickwit is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at quickwit-oss/quickwit and is written mainly in Rust.
Is Quickwit free?: Yes. Quickwit is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host Quickwit?: Yes. Quickwit can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is Quickwit an alternative to?: Quickwit is an open-source alternative to Datadog, Splunk, Elastic and Sumo Logic. Other open-source alternatives to Datadog include OpenObserve, Grafana Loki and SigNoz.
Is Quickwit actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Quickwit was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v0.9.1, published on 23 September 2026. The project has 12k stars on GitHub.