Compare / Aiven
WarpSearch vs Aiven for OpenSearch
Managed OpenSearch clusters on a fixed monthly plan. You pick node count, RAM and disk; it runs all month whether you query it or not.
How they bill
| WarpSearch | Aiven | |
|---|---|---|
| Billing unit | Per GB stored, per GB written, per request | Fixed monthly plan per cluster size |
| Smallest HA plan (AWS us-east-1) | $10 a month minimum | $365 a month (business-4: 3 nodes x 4 GB RAM, 240 GB disk) |
| Scale to zero | Yes | No. Clusters run all month |
| Capacity planning | None | You size nodes, disk and shards |
| API | Elasticsearch, OpenSearch and Solr compatible | Full OpenSearch |
Price
Monthly cost for four common workloads, at list prices in US East.
1M text chunks with 768-dim embeddings, 7 GB of JSON. 1M queries a month spread through the day. 1 GB written a month.
| WarpSearch | Aiven | |
|---|---|---|
| Storage | $0.56 (7 GB held x $0.08) | In plan |
| Writes | $1.00 (1 GB x $1.00) | In plan |
| Search | $2.00 (1M requests) | In plan |
| Data returned | $0 (about 40 GB, inside the free 100 GB) | In plan |
| Minimum | $10 minimum applies (usage is $3.56) | business-4 or business-8 |
| Total a month | $10 | $365 to $730 |
1M 768-dim vectors need about 3 GB of RAM for HNSW, so 8 GB nodes are the safe pick.
5M products with 384-dim embeddings, 10 GB of JSON. 50M queries a month (about 19 a second on average). 20 GB written a month.
| WarpSearch | Aiven | |
|---|---|---|
| Storage | $0.60 (7.5 GB held x $0.08) | In plan |
| Writes | $20 (20 GB x $1.00) | In plan |
| Search | $100 (50M requests) | In plan |
| Data returned | $18 (250 GB returned, 100 GB free, before compression) | In plan |
| Minimum | Cleared | business-8 or business-16 |
| Total a month | $139 | $730 to $1,455 |
10 TB of raw logs kept searchable. 1 TB written a month. 10,000 dashboard aggregation queries a month.
| WarpSearch | Aiven | |
|---|---|---|
| Storage | $455 (8.5 TB held: 1 TB x $0.08, 7.5 TB x $0.05) | In plan |
| Writes | $1,000 (1 TB x $1.00) | In plan |
| Search | $10 (10,000 requests, about 10 CPU-seconds each) | In plan |
| Data returned | $0 | In plan |
| Minimum | Cleared | Plan with about 20 TB of disk (with replicas) |
| Total a month | $1,465 | About $18,000 |
Smallest standard plan with enough disk. Aiven tiered storage may lower this; not priced here.
1 PB of raw logs kept searchable. 50 TB written a month. 100,000 heavy aggregation queries a month.
| WarpSearch | Aiven | |
|---|---|---|
| Total a month | $39,060 | Custom |
Beyond the standard plans.
Performance
What Aiven publishes
| Query latency | Not published. Same engine as self-run OpenSearch on the chosen nodes |
|---|---|
| Vendor claim | "Up to 60% lower search latency" on OpenSearch 3.3 vs their 2.x, workload not stated |
| Cold start | None. The cluster is always on |
Aiven runs standard OpenSearch on dedicated nodes, so latency depends on the plan you buy. It has no cold start because it never scales down. You pay for that all month.
What we measured
| Test | Result |
|---|---|
| Keyword search, 2.8M docs (LoTTE) | 2.1 ms median, 3,700 queries/s |
| Keyword search, 10M passages (MS MARCO v2) | 2.4 ms median (5.4 ms with an exact total hit count) |
| Keyword search, small BEIR sets | 1 to 6 ms median |
| Vector search, 10M x 128-dim (BigANN SIFT) | 0.964 recall@10 at 6.2 ms median, 162 queries/s |
| Vector search, 1M x 1536-dim (arXiv) | 0.961 recall@10 at 15.7 ms median |
| Filtered vector search, 10M (YFCC) | 0.959 recall@10 at 10.4 ms median |
| Log filters, 22M events (http_logs) | 1 to 2 ms median |
| Log aggregations, 22M events | 190 to 430 ms median (sort, daily histogram, avg by status) |
| Ingest, short text | 63,000 to 97,000 docs/s |
| Ingest, logs (247M events) | 76,000 to 81,000 events/s |
| Ingest, 768 to 1536-dim vectors | 2,200 to 4,000 vectors/s |
| Time to searchable | Seconds, or immediate with commit=true |
| Cold start | Not measured yet. First query on a 2.3 GB index: 17 to 19 ms vs 2.7 ms warm (page cache only) |
Measured October 2026 through our Elasticsearch-compatible API, warm cache, client in the same region, single runs. Every test ran on deliberately minimal hardware, 2 to 4 CPUs (a 4 CPU container or an AWS i8g.large with 2 vCPUs), so these are the least favorable results we can produce. More hardware only improves them. Numbers exclude internet round trips.
Bottom line
Choose WarpSearch for
- Every workload we priced: $10 vs $365+ for RAG, $139 vs $730+ for catalog, about $1,500 vs about $18,000 for 10 TB of logs.
- No nodes, disk or shards to size, and no paying for idle hours.
Choose Aiven for
- Always warm: no cold start on any query.
- Full OpenSearch plugin set and cluster-level control.
- Multi-cloud: Aiven runs on AWS, Google Cloud and Azure as a managed service.
If your traffic is not steady around the clock, WarpSearch costs a fraction of a fixed cluster. Aiven makes sense when you need full OpenSearch control and steady load.
Sources
Plan prices are hourly rates from Aiven's public API x 730 hours. Hobbyist and free plans are not offered in AWS us-east-1. Prices checked October 20, 2026. List prices in US dollars, before discounts. Estimates are marked. Tell us if something is out of date: contact us.