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Compare · Amazon Kendra

Amazon Kendra alternative for teams migrating now that Kendra is in maintenance mode

AWS has put Amazon Kendra into Maintenance Mode as of June 30, 2026, and the service stopped accepting new customers on July 30, 2026. Existing indexes keep running, and AWS says it will continue shipping bug fixes and security updates, but there will be no new features. AWS's own guidance is to migrate Kendra applications, and build any new search application, on Amazon Bedrock Managed Knowledge Base.

One search · cited answers · permission-aware

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That leaves teams with a real fork in the road. Bedrock Managed Knowledge Base is a managed RAG toolkit you build an application on top of: AWS's own migration guide lists 7 native connectors for the managed knowledge base against Kendra's 32, and notes that faceted search, query suggestions, custom synonyms, spell checking, incremental learning and custom document enrichment all need workarounds you implement yourself. If your goal was a search platform to build on, that is a reasonable path. If your goal was employees getting answers, you are being asked to build a product.

Kendra is also not the only AWS search product that closed its doors. Amazon Q Business, the assistant many teams ran on top of Kendra, stopped accepting new customers one day later on July 31, 2026, with AWS pointing those customers to Amazon Quick. If you were running both, you are scoping two migrations with two different destinations, not one.

InSearch is the other fork: a finished workplace search you connect rather than construct. It searches Google Drive, Slack, Notion, Confluence, Gmail, Jira and Salesforce in one query and returns a written answer with inline citations, with item-level permissions enforced at query time and no training on your data. No index capacity to provision, no retrieval pipeline to assemble, no application to write.

Amazon Kendra is in maintenance mode and closed to new customers from July 30, 2026, with AWS pointing migrations at Bedrock Managed Knowledge Base, a RAG toolkit you build on. InSearch is the finished alternative: connect your apps and get cited, permission-aware answers without building a search application.

Side by side

Amazon Kendra vs InSearch, honestly

A fair look at what each does well. Both are capable tools. Here is where they differ.

What matters InSearch Amazon Kendra
Status in 2026 Actively developed and shipping Maintenance Mode since June 30, 2026; closed to new customers from July 30, 2026; no new features
What you get A finished workplace search product, not a service you build on top of A search service you build an application on top of
AWS migration path Not applicable; connect your apps and search AWS recommends migrating to Amazon Bedrock Managed Knowledge Base
Connectors Drive, Slack, Notion, Confluence, Gmail, Jira and Salesforce out of the box Kendra ships 32 native connectors; the Bedrock managed knowledge base ships 7, so other sources need a custom pipeline into S3
Answers Written answer with inline citations to the source docs Kendra returns ranked passages; generating an answer needs an external LLM you wire up
Pricing model Transparent per seat, so cost tracks the people using it Provisioned index capacity: storage units and query unit hours billed from index creation until deletion, plus connector sync
Engineering effort Connect apps, invite the team Provision the index, build ingestion, retrieval, ranking, permissions and the UI
Best suited for Teams that want employees answering questions, not a search stack to maintain Teams with AWS engineers who want to build custom search inside their own AWS account

Comparison reflects general, publicly understood positioning. Capabilities change, so check each product for the latest.

Why teams pick InSearch

One cited, permission-aware search across every app

A product, not a build

Bedrock Managed Knowledge Base hands you a RAG toolkit and a migration guide. InSearch hands your team a working search box on the apps they already use.

Nothing to re-platform

No index to provision, no chunking strategy to pick, no connectors to rebuild in Lambda. You connect the apps and start asking questions.

Cited and permission-aware

Item-level permissions from each source enforced at query time, and every answer traceable to the exact document it came from.

Good questions

Amazon Kendra vs InSearch, answered

Not discontinued, but it is winding down. AWS put Kendra into Maintenance Mode on June 30, 2026, and it stopped accepting new customers on July 30, 2026. Existing customers keep a fully supported service with bug fixes and security updates, but AWS will not build new features for it and recommends migrating to Amazon Bedrock Managed Knowledge Base.
It depends on what you were using Kendra for. If you were building custom search inside AWS, Bedrock Managed Knowledge Base is the path AWS recommends. If you were using Kendra so employees could find answers across company apps, a finished product like InSearch is a better fit: it connects Drive, Slack, Notion, Confluence, Gmail, Jira and Salesforce and returns cited, permission-aware answers with no application to build.
Migrating to Bedrock Managed Knowledge Base means re-ingesting every data source and rewriting your application against new APIs. AWS documents both, and flags that faceted search, query suggestions, custom synonyms, spell checking, incremental learning and custom document enrichment need workarounds. Moving to InSearch skips that work entirely, because you connect the source apps directly instead of rebuilding an index.
No. Kendra stopped accepting new customers on July 30, 2026, so spinning up a first Kendra index is no longer an option. If you already run Kendra, it keeps working and stays supported with bug fixes and security updates, which gives you room to plan a migration rather than rush one.

Find any answer at work with InSearch

One search across all your company apps, a clear cited answer, scoped to exactly what each person can see, and never trained on your data.

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One search across every app · cited answers · permission-aware · never trains on your data