Meilisearch
Lightning-fast typo-tolerant search. The Algolia alternative that doesn't charge per-query.
What it is
Meilisearch is a lightweight, blazingly fast search engine written in Rust. It indexes your documents (products, blog posts, users, anything) and serves sub-50ms typo-tolerant search results over a clean REST API. It's the open source answer to Algolia, but without the per-query pricing that adds up at scale.
Why we recommend it
The developer experience is excellent — one Docker container, one POST to index, and you have a production-grade search. It handles typo tolerance, faceting, multi-language tokenization, custom ranking, and instant search-as-you-type out of the box. The Cloud offering is pay-per-GB-indexed, not per-query, so you can scale without watching a meter.
When to use it
- E-commerce product search (the canonical use case)
- Documentation search (Meilisearch powers the search on the Meilisearch, Rust, and Phabricator docs sites)
- Any app that needs < 50ms search latency
- Replacing Elasticsearch when you don't need full-text + analytics + log search (90% of apps don't)
Quickstart
Run this in your terminal. Self-hosts locally with Docker or your preferred setup.
$ docker run -d -p 7700:7700 -e MEILI_MASTER_KEY=replace-me getmeili/meilisearch:v1.10Setup
Tags
Integrates with
Common use cases
- →product-search
- →docs-search
- →autocomplete
- →ecommerce
Pricing
Self-host: free, MIT. Cloud: $30/mo starter (100K docs), $250/mo production (10M docs), $1,250/mo business (100M docs). No per-query fees.
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