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Meilisearch

Lightning-fast, open-source search engine — a developer-friendly Algolia alternative.

Meilisearch is an open-source, lightning-fast search engine written in Rust. Designed as a developer-friendly alternative to Algolia with typo tolerance, faceted search, filtering, and sorting out of the box. Sub-50ms response times. Easy to deploy and configure with a RESTful API.

About Meilisearch

Meilisearch is a search engine built in Rust that prioritizes speed and developer experience. It provides instant, relevant search results with built-in typo tolerance, synonyms, stop words, and ranking customization — all configured through a simple RESTful API.

Key features include faceted search for filtering, multi-index search, geosearch, multi-tenancy, and built-in analytics. SDKs are available for JavaScript, Python, PHP, Ruby, Go, Rust, Java, Swift, and Dart. The search-as-you-type experience typically returns results in under 50 milliseconds.

Meilisearch is open source under the MIT license. Self-hosting is completely free. Meilisearch Cloud offers managed hosting starting with a free tier (100K documents) and production plans from $30/month.

Pricing & Platform Specs

Pricing Summary

Meilisearch is free and open-source under the MIT license for self-hosting. Hosted Meilisearch Cloud plans start at $30/month for a baseline of 100K documents and 50K searches, scaling with pay-as-you-go usage, alongside custom Enterprise options.

full pricing breakdown →

Supported Platforms

Self-hosted on Linux, Docker, Kubernetes. Meilisearch Cloud managed. REST API.

Explore categories, tags & use cases

BM25 full-text search extension for PostgreSQL

pg_textsearch is a PostgreSQL extension from Timescale that adds BM25 relevance-ranked full-text search directly inside Postgres. Using the same ranking algorithm as Elasticsearch and Lucene, it provides search-engine quality results without requiring a separate search cluster — particularly valuable for developers building RAG pipelines on PostgreSQL who want semantic-quality ranking alongside pgvector.

Open Source

Enterprise RAG framework by Tencent

WeKnora is a Tencent-developed LLM-powered knowledge management and Q&A framework for enterprise document understanding and semantic retrieval. Supports 10+ document formats including PDF, Word, Excel, and images with seamless IM platform integration for WeCom, Feishu, Slack, and Telegram. Offers Quick Q&A mode using RAG pipelines and Intelligent Reasoning mode with ReACT agents for complex multi-step reasoning tasks across organizational knowledge bases.

freemiumOpen Source

Side-by-Side Comparisons

Elasticsearch logo
Elasticsearch
vs
Meilisearch logo
Meilisearch

Elasticsearch vs Meilisearch: Enterprise Search or Simple App Search?

Elasticsearch is a broad distributed search and analytics platform; Meilisearch is a focused application-search engine. Meilisearch wins for most product, documentation, and internal-search teams because it reaches strong relevance with far less operational weight, while Elasticsearch remains the choice for analytics, logs, and very large distributed workloads.

ElasticsearchMeilisearch
Meilisearch logo
Meilisearch
vs
Typesense logo
Typesense

Meilisearch vs Typesense: Flexible App Search or In-Memory Speed?

Meilisearch and Typesense are fast, developer-focused search engines, but their storage, capacity, and semantic-search choices lead to different production trade-offs. Meilisearch serves as the more practical daily standard for most app-search teams; Typesense is strongest when a measured in-memory workload justifies dedicated capacity.

MeilisearchTypesense

Community experience

Sources & verification

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Content verified

Verification dates are editorial checks. Routine CMS saves and automatic updatedAt timestamps do not advance them.

FAQ

What is Meilisearch?

Meilisearch is an open-source, lightning-fast search engine written in Rust. Designed as a developer-friendly alternative to Algolia with typo tolerance, faceted search, filtering, and sorting out of the box. Sub-50ms response times. Easy to deploy and configure with a RESTful API.

Is Meilisearch free?

Meilisearch offers a free tier alongside paid plans. Meilisearch is free and open-source under the MIT license for self-hosting. Hosted Meilisearch Cloud plans start at $30/month for a baseline of 100K documents and 50K searches, scaling with pay-as-you-go usage, alongside custom Enterprise options.

Is Meilisearch open source?

Yes — Meilisearch is open source.

Is Meilisearch still maintained?

Yes — Meilisearch is active. Its listing was last verified on August 26, 2026.

What are the best Meilisearch alternatives?

The first editor-selected Meilisearch alternatives are pg_textsearch, WeKnora.