Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Typesense VS Meilisearch

Compare Typesense VS Meilisearch and see what are their differences

Typesense logo Typesense

Typo tolerant, delightfully simple, open source search 🔍

Meilisearch logo Meilisearch

Ultra relevant, instant, and typo-tolerant full-text search API
  • Typesense Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-11-07
  • Meilisearch Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-12-16

Meilisearch is a powerful, fast, open-source, easy to use, and deploy search engine. The search and indexation are fully customizable and handles features like typo-tolerance, filters, and synonyms.

Typesense features and specs

  • High Performance
    Typesense offers highly optimized search capabilities with fast response times, ensuring quick retrieval of search results even with large datasets.
  • Easy to Set Up
    Typesense is user-friendly and can be quickly set up using a simple configuration, making it accessible for developers who need a straightforward search solution.
  • Real-Time Indexing
    Typesense supports real-time indexing, meaning new data or updates to existing data are searchable almost immediately without significant delay.
  • Open Source
    Being an open-source solution, Typesense provides transparency, community support, and the possibility for customization to meet specific needs.
  • Typo Tolerance
    Typesense’s built-in typo tolerance allows for forgiving spell-check and correction, enhancing user experience by returning relevant results despite minor typing errors.
  • Faceted Search
    The platform supports faceted search, which lets users narrow down search results through various categories, improving relevancy and user navigation.

Possible disadvantages of Typesense

  • Limited Advanced Features
    Compared to some competitors, Typesense offers fewer advanced search features like natural language processing or machine learning-based relevance tuning.
  • Community Support
    Being relatively newer, Typesense has a smaller user base and community support compared to established search engines like ElasticSearch or Solr.
  • Documentation
    Some users may find Typesense’s documentation to be less comprehensive, potentially leading to a steeper learning curve for complex use-cases.
  • Scalability
    While Typesense is scalable, enterprise-level users managing extremely large datasets might find it less robust compared to established solutions that have been battle-tested in large-scale environments.
  • Ecosystem Integration
    The integration ecosystem is still developing, which means fewer out-of-the-box integrations with other popular tools and platforms compared to older search engines.

Meilisearch features and specs

  • Speed
    Meilisearch is optimized for performance and provides very fast search capabilities, often with response times in milliseconds.
  • Relevance
    It offers advanced search features like typo tolerance, synonyms, and configurable ranking rules to ensure highly relevant search results.
  • Ease of Use
    Designed to be user-friendly with a straightforward RESTful API, making it easy to integrate and use.
  • Open Source
    Meilisearch is open source, allowing developers to inspect the code, contribute, and customize it to fit their own needs.
  • Language Support
    It supports multiple languages, ensuring effective full-text search capabilities in various linguistic contexts.
  • Lightweight
    Meilisearch is lightweight and can be deployed on modest hardware, making it suitable for small to medium-sized projects.
  • Real-time Indexing
    It offers real-time indexing, allowing the index to be updated without significant downtime or delay.

Possible disadvantages of Meilisearch

  • Maturity
    As a relatively young project, it may lack some advanced features and optimizations found in more established search solutions like Elasticsearch.
  • Ecosystem
    The ecosystem and community around Meilisearch are still growing, so you might find fewer plugins, extensions, and third-party tools compared to more mature solutions.
  • Scalability
    While suitable for small to medium projects, it might not be as scalable for very large datasets or highly complex queries compared to other search engines like Solr or Elasticsearch.
  • Complex Query Handling
    Meilisearch focuses on simplicity, which means it may lack some of the advanced query capabilities provided by more complex search engines.
  • Documentation
    Though improving, the documentation may not be as comprehensive as that of longer-established projects, which could lead to a steeper learning curve for some users.

Typesense videos

Getting started with Typesense

Meilisearch videos

No Meilisearch videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Typesense and Meilisearch)
Custom Search Engine
64 64%
36% 36
Custom Search
66 66%
34% 34
Search Engine
58 58%
42% 42
Developer Tools
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Typesense and Meilisearch

Typesense Reviews

Best Elasticsearch alternatives for search
A plug for yours truly! At Relevance AI, we’re building an Elasticsearch alternative that is very different to alternatives like Algolia and Typesense. Relevance AI search is an instant search API that understands “semantics”.
Source: relevance.ai
5 Open-Source Search Engines For your Website
Typesense is a fast, typo-tolerant search engine for building delightful search experiences. It claims that it is an Easier-to-Use ElasticSearch Alternative & an Open Source Algolia Alternative.
Source: vishnuch.tech
Recommendations for Poor Man's ElasticSearch on AWS?
Oh hey! I'm one of the co-founders of Typesense. Delighted to stumble on a mention of Typesense on Indiehackers. Long time lurker, first time poster :)

Meilisearch Reviews

5 Open-Source Search Engines For your Website
MeiliSearch is an open-source, blazingly fast and hyper-relevant search engine that will improve your search experience. It provides an extensive toolset for customization. It works out-of-the-box with a preset that easily answers the needs of most applications. Communication is done with a RESTful API because most developers are already familiar with its norms.
Source: vishnuch.tech
MeiliSearch: Zero-config alternative to Elasticsearch, made in Rust | Hacker News
"We send events to our Amplitude instance to be aware of the number of people who use MeiliSearch. We only send the platform on which the server runs once by day. No other information is sent. If you do not want us to send events, you can disable these analytics by using the MEILI_NO_ANALYTICS env variable."
Recommendations for Poor Man's ElasticSearch on AWS?
I'd second these two. I've been following them for quite some time. I even did an extensive research on which one I'd use, and I ended up with Typesense. I don't remember the specific reasoning though. Both seem quite good. MeiliSearch is written in Rust, which makes it more "hipsterish" ;)

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Typesense seems to be a lot more popular than Meilisearch. While we know about 58 links to Typesense, we've tracked only 4 mentions of Meilisearch. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Typesense mentions (58)

View more

Meilisearch mentions (4)

  • Show HN: Cardstock- Free TCG Proxy Manager for Magic, Yugioh, & Pokemon
    This thing is amazing. Kamal gives me everything I could want (easy console access, easy shell access, a way to manage secrets, a way to see my logs, and letsencrypt support for DNS), all without a PaaS tax. The best part is the accessories feature: https://kamal-deploy.org/docs/commands/accessory/. I am running my main app with two accessories: Meilisearch(https://meilisearch.com) and OpenObserve... - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • Show HN: Hyvor Blogs – Multi-language blogging platform
    Meilisearch [https://meilisearch.com] for the search index. - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
  • Meilisearch, the Rust search engine, just raised $5M
    Meilisearch is an open-source, lightning-fast, and hyper-relevant search engine that fits effortlessly into your apps, websites, and workflow. You can find more info on our website https://meilisearch.com. Source: over 3 years ago
  • Search engines for website
    Algolia.com - new plans are very affordable Meilisearch.com - open source. Source: about 4 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Typesense and Meilisearch, you can also consider the following products

Algolia - Algolia's Search API makes it easy to deliver a great search experience in your apps & websites. Algolia Search provides hosted full-text, numerical, faceted and geolocalized search.

ElasticSearch - Elasticsearch is an open source, distributed, RESTful search engine.

Apache Solr - Solr is an open source enterprise search server based on Lucene search library, with XML/HTTP and...

Vespa.ai - Store, search, rank and organize big data

TopK.io - TopK is a cloud-native database intended for search use cases. It comes with keyword search, vector search, and metadata filtering built-in. Easy-to-use search engine loved by developers of all skill levels.

Milvus - Vector database built for scalable similarity search Open-source, highly scalable, and blazing fast.