Meilisearch
SearchA search engine for apps and sites with typo tolerance, filters, and hybrid keyword and vector search, run as a single binary or as a managed cloud service.
Open-source alternative to:
What the free edition leaves out
The free edition is genuinely usable, but some team or enterprise features need a paid plan. “Not confirmed” means the official pages we read did not say, so we do not guess.
| Feature | Free edition | Details | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| SSO / SAML | Paid | The pricing page lists SSO SAML under the Enterprise plan of Meilisearch Cloud. | Source ↗ |
| Role-based access control | Free | Self-hosted instances use a master key plus API keys scoped to specific indexes, routes and actions, and keys can expire. | Source ↗ |
| Audit logs | Not confirmed | Audit logs are not described on the pages read. | Source ↗ |
| Multi-user / teams | Not confirmed | Multiple dashboard users are not described for self-hosted instances; the pages read cover API keys, not user accounts. | Source ↗ |
| Backups and restore | Free | The Community Edition has snapshots (schedulable at launch) and dumps. Streaming snapshots to S3 is listed by the README as an Enterprise Edition feature. | Source ↗ |
| API access | Free | Search, documents, indexes, settings and API keys are all managed through the HTTP API. | Source ↗ |
| Support SLA | Paid | The pricing page lists an uptime SLA of up to 99.999 percent and a dedicated Slack channel under the Enterprise plan, and email support under the Cloud plan. Self-hosted community support channels are Discord and GitHub. | Source ↗ |
Best for
Developers who want a simple, typo-tolerant search engine for a site or app that they can run on one small server.
Why choose it over Algolia
The Community Edition is MIT licensed, runs as a single binary and has no limits on usage when self-hosted. It supports full-text, semantic and hybrid search, and scoped API keys. Its docs include a guide for migrating from Algolia.
Where it falls short
Sharding and replication are Enterprise Edition features under the Business Source License, which is not allowed in production without a commercial agreement, so a self-hosted install cannot scale across several nodes on the free license. SAML SSO and the uptime SLA are on the Enterprise Cloud plan. Meilisearch's own comparison page says Algolia offers a fuller merchandising dashboard, A/B testing and e-commerce platform connectors than Meilisearch's Search Rules.
Open-source alternative to
- Algolia — Meilisearch's own docs compare it with Algolia and include a migration guide, so it can replace Algolia as the search backend of a site or app, either self-hosted or on Meilisearch Cloud.
Category
SearchTopics
Tech stack
Rust
DockerLanguages as reported by GitHub for the repository.
