Search Engines

4 open source tools compared. Sorted by stars. Scroll down for our analysis.

Tool	Stars	Velocity	Language	License	Score
Meilisearch Lightning fast, relevant, and typo-tolerant search engine	57.5k	+79/wk	Rust	MIT License	84
Typesense Open source alternative to Algolia and Elasticsearch	25.8k	+33/wk	C++	GNU General Public License v3.0	74
Sonic Fast lightweight search backend	21.2k	+7/wk	Rust	Mozilla Public License 2.0	78
ZincSearch Lightweight search engine as a drop-in for Elasticsearch	17.8k	+5/wk	Go	Apache License 2.0	81

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Our Analysis

Meilisearch57.5k★

Meilisearch returns search results in under 50 milliseconds with typo tolerance, faceted filtering, and instant-as-you-type suggestions. Drop your data in, point your frontend at it, and you have search that feels like Algolia. It handles typos, filtering, faceting, and ranking out of the box. Self-hosting is free. The cloud version has a free tier (100K documents, 10K searches/mo) and paid plans starting at $30/mo. The self-hosted version has every feature, no gating. The catch: Meilisearch is a search engine, not a database. It's meant to index data that lives somewhere else (your Postgres, your CMS). So you're running two systems and keeping them in sync. The license recently changed from MIT to a custom 'source available' license that restricts offering Meilisearch as a managed service. Fine for internal use, but worth knowing. And for truly large datasets (100M+ documents), Elasticsearch is still the safer bet for performance.

Typesense25.8k★

Typesense is a search engine built for instant, typo-tolerant search with relevance ranking. It's the open source answer to Algolia (the search-as-a-service that powers search on many major sites). Drop in your data, configure your ranking rules, and you get sub-50ms search responses out of the box. The feature set is impressive for an open source tool: typo tolerance, faceted search (filter by category, price range, etc.), geo-search, synonym support, vector search for AI-powered semantic results, and a built-in analytics dashboard. The API is clean and the documentation is excellent. Self-hosted is completely free under GPL v3. Written in C++, it's fast and memory-efficient. A single node handles millions of documents comfortably. Meilisearch is the closest competitor: similar features, more permissive MIT license, arguably better developer experience. ZincSearch is simpler and lighter but far less feature-rich. The catch: GPL v3 means if you modify Typesense and distribute it, you must open source your changes. For most users (running it as a service), this doesn't matter. Clustering for high availability requires the paid Typesense Cloud, which starts at $25/mo. The self-hosted version supports clustering but it's not as polished as the cloud offering. Also, it's search-only, not a general-purpose database.

Sonic21.2k★

Sonic is a lightweight search backend that delivers fast results using a fraction of the resources of Elasticsearch. It's a search index that sits between your database and your users: you push text in, it indexes it, and it returns results fast. Written in Rust, runs in under 20MB of RAM. MPL 2.0 license. Sonic isn't a full search engine. It's a search index and suggest engine. You store your documents elsewhere (database, files) and push text to Sonic for indexing. It gives you search results as IDs, and you look up the full documents yourself. Supports autocomplete and typo tolerance. Fully free. No paid tier, no cloud hosting. Self-host only. Setup is simple: single binary, one config file, runs as a daemon. Ops burden is minimal once running. It's designed to be a background service you don't think about. Solo projects and small apps: Sonic is perfect when you need better-than-SQL search without running a JVM. Medium projects: works well up to a few million documents. The catch: Sonic doesn't do faceted search, filtering, aggregations, or relevance tuning. It's fast text search and autocomplete, nothing more. If you need those features, you need Meilisearch or Typesense. And the protocol is custom (not HTTP REST), which means you need a client library for your language.

ZincSearch17.8k★

ZincSearch does what Elasticsearch does but without the operational nightmare. It's a search engine you embed into your stack. It ingests documents, indexes them, and lets you query with the same Elasticsearch-compatible API most developers already know. The big sell: it runs as a single binary. No JVM, no cluster setup, no 4GB of RAM just to start. Written in Go, it starts in seconds and uses a fraction of the resources. For small-to-medium datasets (millions of documents, not billions), it handles search, log aggregation, and basic analytics. It's fully open source and self-hosted. No cloud offering, no paid tier. You run it yourself. Setup is trivial: download the binary, set two environment variables, run it. The built-in UI for log exploration is surprisingly good. The catch: it's not Elasticsearch at scale. If you're dealing with terabytes of logs or need distributed clustering across dozens of nodes, you'll outgrow it. The project has also seen slower development recently. For a more actively maintained alternative, Meilisearch is fantastic for user-facing search. Typesense is another strong option with a managed cloud offering if you don't want to self-host.