Meilisearch

What is Meilisearch?

Meilisearch is an open-source search engine written in Rust, built to add fast, relevant search to a website or application with minimal setup. It started as a typo-tolerant full-text engine and now also does semantic (vector) search and hybrid search that blends keyword matching with AI embeddings. On top of search it offers filtering, faceting, federated multi-index search, geosearch, and built-in analytics. It is dual-licensed: MIT for the community edition, with a separate enterprise edition.

How it works

You run Meilisearch yourself or use the managed Meilisearch Cloud, then index your documents and query them over a REST API. Official SDKs cover JavaScript, Python, PHP, Ruby, Go, and Rust, along with integrations for common frontend frameworks. For semantic and hybrid search it generates and stores vector embeddings alongside the keyword index, so a single query can rank by both exact matches and meaning. Meilisearch advertises search responses in under 50 milliseconds, which is the main reason teams reach for it over a heavier search stack.

Pricing

Self-hosting is free and open-source; you manage updates, backups, and scaling. Meilisearch Cloud is the managed option, starting around $20-30/month (a usage-based base plan and a resource-based instance plan), with a 14-day free trial and no credit card required. An Enterprise tier adds SSO/SAML, SOC 2, and uptime SLAs under custom pricing. Check the pricing page for current limits, since they are estimated from your document and search volume.

Who it's for

Meilisearch fits developers who want fast site or app search, autocomplete, and increasingly RAG-style retrieval, without standing up a full vector database or a heavier engine. Compared with a dedicated vector database (Qdrant, Weaviate, Pinecone) it leads with full-text relevance and adds vectors on top, rather than the other way around; compared with Elasticsearch or OpenSearch it trades depth of features for simpler setup and lower operational overhead. For pure keyword search its open-source nearest neighbor is Typesense.