Typesense

Search that's fast enough to feel instant and simple enough to set up in an afternoon. Typesense is a single C++ binary that keeps the entire index in RAM, delivering sub-50ms responses on million-document collections. If Elasticsearch feels like overkill for your product search, Typesense is the answer.

Meilisearch is the closest competitor — similar ease of use, built in Rust, uses disk-backed storage. Algolia is the commercial gold standard but charges per search operation. Elasticsearch can do everything but requires a team to operate.

Typesense gives you typo tolerance, faceting, geo search, and vector search out of the box. The API is clean and well-documented. Typesense Cloud offers predictable pricing based on cluster size, not search volume.

The catch: GPLv3 license — if you modify Typesense and distribute it, your changes must be open sourced. The entire index must fit in RAM, which means costs scale with data size. No built-in analytics or A/B testing like Algolia. And for very large datasets (100M+ documents), Elasticsearch's distributed architecture handles scale better.