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Meilisearch
Developer-friendly search engine — Rust-based, 50ms search, simple REST API, 44,000+ GitHub stars.
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About Meilisearch
Meilisearch is an open-source, Rust-based search engine designed for developer experience — the simplest possible API with fast results. 44,000+ GitHub stars make it one of the most starred search projects on GitHub.
Meilisearch vs Typesense: both are open-source, developer-friendly search engines. Meilisearch has more GitHub stars (44K vs 20K) and a simpler API. Typesense has more advanced features (geo-search, vector search). Both are significantly cheaper than Algolia.
Simple API: three operations cover 90% of search use cases:
```
curl -X POST http://localhost:7700/indexes/movies/documents -d @movies.json
curl http://localhost:7700/indexes/movies/search?q=batman
```
That''s indexing and searching. No schema definition required — Meilisearch infers types automatically.
Relevance out of the box: Meilisearch ranks results by a combination of typo tolerance, word frequency, proximity, and attribute weight. The default ranking produces relevant results for most use cases without configuration.
Federated search (v1.8): query multiple indexes simultaneously and merge results — search products, users, and documentation in one API call.
Tenant tokens: JWT-based access control scoping searches to specific filter rules per user — useful for multi-tenant search where each user sees only their data.
Key Features
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Auto-inference: no schema required — Meilisearch infers field types from indexed documents
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Typo tolerance: handles 1-2 character typos per word by default
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Filters and facets: filter_by and facets in one query for category navigation
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Federated search: query multiple indexes simultaneously and merge ranked results
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Tenant tokens: JWT tokens that scope searches to specific filter rules per user
Pros
- ✓44,000+ GitHub stars — the most community-supported open-source search engine
- ✓Simplest search API: 2 API calls to index documents and search — no schema required
- ✓50ms average search response with typo tolerance and relevance ranking out of the box
- ✓Rust-based: low memory footprint (50 MB at idle) and high throughput on modest hardware
- ✓Federated search: query multiple indexes in one call and merge results
Cons
- ✗Less advanced than Elasticsearch for complex aggregations and analytics
- ✗Smaller index size limit than Elasticsearch — not suitable for billions of documents
- ✗Meilisearch Cloud at $30/month is pricier than self-hosted Typesense at $5/month
Who is using Meilisearch?
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Developers adding search to a project who want the simplest possible setup
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SaaS products adding search to their application without an Elasticsearch administrator
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Documentation sites and developer portals that need fast, relevant full-text search
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Multi-tenant applications using tenant tokens to scope search results per user
Use Cases
- →Adding full-text search to a Rails application by indexing records and querying Meilisearch
- →Setting up documentation search on a developer portal with federated search across multiple sections
- →Using tenant tokens to ensure each SaaS customer only searches their own data
- →Building an autocomplete search UI that returns results in under 50ms as the user types
Pricing
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Self-hosted : $0/mo — Full search engine, MIT license, Community support
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Meilisearch Cloud : $30/mo — Managed hosting, Priority support, Auto-scaling
Pricing details may not be up to date. For the most accurate and current pricing, refer to the official website.
What Makes Meilisearch Unique?
The developer-friendly Rust-based search engine with 44,000+ GitHub stars — no schema required, 50ms search with typo tolerance and relevance ranking, and federated multi-index search, all self-hosted for free.
How We Rated It
GitHub stars from github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch. API example tested on Meilisearch 1.8. Latency measured from localhost on a Hetzner CPX11.
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Accuracy and Reliability 4.6/5
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Ease of Use 4.8/5
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Functionality and Features 4.5/5
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Performance and Speed 4.8/5
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Customer Support 4.3/5
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Value for Money 4.9/5
AI summary
Developer-friendly search engine — Rust-based, 50ms search, simple REST API, 44,000+ GitHub stars.