Elastic is a Dutch-American software company that provides a platform for enterprise search, observability, and cybersecurity, built around Elasticsearch — the most widely used enterprise search engine in the world. Elasticsearch provides distributed, full-text search with support for structured and unstructured data, vector search, real-time analytics, and AI-powered relevance tuning. This isn't just an ecosystem partner for dotCMS — it's a core dependency.

dotCMS uses Elasticsearch as a full-text search engine to index and query content, powering everything from site-wide search to content API queries, geolocation lookups, aggregations, and suggestion features. dotCMS has standardized on Amazon's OpenSearch (the open-source Elasticsearch fork) for supported deployments, while maintaining compatibility with Elasticsearch 7.1+. For teams that need advanced search capabilities beyond the defaults, the full Elasticsearch query DSL is available through dotCMS's APIs.