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meilisearch

Meilisearch

TypeScriptOpen SourceFull-text SearchRust

Lightning-fast open-source search engine written in Rust — instant-as-you-type search, faceting, and geosearch with a delightfully simple API.

License

MIT

Language

TypeScript

Used for
82
Trust
Strong

Why Meilisearch?

Open-source Algolia alternative that's easier to self-host than Elasticsearch

Apps needing faceted search, geosearch, or multi-index federation

Developer-friendly search with a clean REST API and great defaults

Signal Breakdown

What drives the Trust Score

npm downloads
250k / wk
Commits (90d)
200 commits
GitHub stars
47k ★
Stack Overflow
500 q's
Community
Growing
Weighted Trust Score82 / 100

Download Trend

Last 12 months

Tradeoffs & Caveats

Know before you commit

Enterprise-scale deployments with billions of documents — Elasticsearch scales further

Fully managed search without self-hosting — use Algolia

Pricing

Free tier & paid plans

Free tier

Open source self-host free

Paid

Meilisearch Cloud from $30/mo

Alternative Tools

Other options worth considering

algolia
Algolia86Strong

Hosted search-as-a-service with instant typo-tolerant search, AI re-ranking, and drop-in React/Vue UI components.

TS
Typesense80Strong

Fast, typo-tolerant open-source search engine — self-host or use Typesense Cloud, with an Algolia-compatible API and near-instant indexing.

elasticsearch
Elasticsearch98Excellent

The leading distributed search and analytics engine. Elasticsearch powers full-text search, log aggregation (ELK stack), and complex analytics queries at scale. Powerful but operationally complex to self-host.

Often Used Together

Complementary tools that pair well with Meilisearch

nextjs

Next.js

Frontend & UI

98Excellent
View
docker

Docker

DevOps & Infra

93Excellent
View

Learning Resources

Docs, videos, tutorials, and courses

Get Started

Repository and installation options

View on GitHub

github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch

npmnpm install meilisearch
pippip install meilisearch

Quick Start

Copy and adapt to get going fast

import { MeiliSearch } from 'meilisearch';

const client = new MeiliSearch({ host: 'http://localhost:7700', apiKey: 'masterKey' });

const index = client.index('movies');
await index.addDocuments([{ id: 1, title: 'Interstellar', genre: 'sci-fi' }]);

const results = await index.search('inter');
console.log(results.hits);

Community Notes

Real experiences from developers who've used this tool