Meilisearch

What is Meilisearch?

Meilisearch is a search engine offering full-text, vector and hybrid, faceted, federated, multimodal and conversational search, plus personalization and AI agents and RAG. It is open source under the MIT license and also sold as a managed Cloud.

Key capabilities of Meilisearch

• Hybrid and vector search: combines keyword and semantic retrieval.
• Faceted and federated search: filters and multi-index queries.
• Conversational search: chat-style answers over your data.
• Multimodal search: search beyond plain text.
• Personalization: ranking tuned per user.
• Enterprise controls: sharding, replication, SSO (SAML) and SOC 2 compliance.

How Meilisearch works

You index your documents through the API, and Meilisearch returns ranked results as users type. You can self-host with no usage limits, handling updates, backups and scaling yourself, or use Meilisearch Cloud.

Who uses Meilisearch?

Developers adding search to apps, ecommerce sites and documentation, plus teams that need a self-hostable alternative to hosted search.

Meilisearch pricing

Self-hosting is free under the MIT license. Cloud starts at $20 per month with a 14-day free trial, no credit card, and usage-based or resource-based billing. Enterprise is custom with an uptime SLA of up to 99.999%.

Meilisearch alternatives

Typesense is another open-source search engine, often compared on speed and ease of setup. Kagi is a paid consumer web search engine, not an app search library. Objective is a search service aimed at AI-powered site search.