Lightning-fast open source search engine API with AI-powered hybrid search, typo tolerance, search-as-you-type, and a managed Meilisearch Cloud option.
Meilisearch is an open source alternative to Algolia. Lightning-fast open source search engine API with AI-powered hybrid search, typo tolerance, search-as-you-type, and a managed Meilisearch Cloud option. MIT AND BUSL-1.1 licensed, 58.6k GitHub stars, hosted version available, self-host with Docker, and last released 2026-07-06.
Should you switch?
Teams that want a fast, out-of-the-box full-text and hybrid search API to replace Algolia, with typo tolerance, search-as-you-type under 50ms, and a managed Cloud path.
You need advanced horizontal scaling like sharding or S3-streaming snapshots in production without a commercial agreement; those are Enterprise Edition features under BSL, not the MIT community build.
The repo is dual-licensed: the Community Edition core is MIT, but sharding and S3-streaming snapshots ship under the Business Source License and require a commercial agreement for production. Telemetry is on by default (data anonymized, can be disabled). Support is community via Discord on the self-hosted path.
In the product
Community proof
"Long story short: Meilisearch is a very good search application for sure, but our needs drifted apart. [...] Our usecase isn't entirely aligned with how Meilisearch is meant to be used, I think. For one, we have a very high number of indices [...] In the end I was ending up spending an inordinate amount of time wrangling Meilisearch to get indices up and running across our different edge nodes [...] the amount of effort needed to orchestrate and keep all the individual Meilisearch nodes up to date and in sync just turned out to be too much hassle."
"Author here. I kept writing the same glue code every time I needed to get markdown, MkDocs output, or a JSON file into Meilisearch for search on a docs or blog site. content-mill is what I extracted after the third time. You write a YAML config that describes your sources and the shape of the Meilisearch documents you want [...] It's v0.1, MIT, used in production on my own site."
Maintenance health
Can you do it today?
docker run -it --rm -p 7700:7700 -v $(pwd)/meili_data:/meili_data getmeili/meilisearch:latestGitHub
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