head to head · open source
Meilisearch vs Quickwit
Meilisearch has 59,758 GitHub stars, 2,786 forks, 321 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Quickwit has 11,760 stars, 623 forks, 815 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Meilisearch leads on adoption by 408% (59,758 vs 11,760 stars). Meilisearch is written in Rust under a custom or non-standard licence; Quickwit is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Meilisearch has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, Quickwit 5%. Quickwit was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Meilisearch | Quickwit | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 60K | ★ 12K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Rust | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.8K | ⑂ 623 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Meilisearch if
- You weight community size — 60K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Quickwit if
- You want the Quickwit feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and Quickwit fits your workflow better
About Meilisearch
Website Roadmap Meilisearch Cloud Blog Documentation FAQ Discord ⚡ A lightning fast search engine that fits effortlessly into your apps, websites, and workflow 🔍 Meilisearch helps you shape a delightful search experience in a snap, offering features that work out of the box to speed up your workflow. 🖥 Examples Movies — An application to help you find streaming platforms to watch movies using hybrid search. Flickr — Search and explore one hundred million Flickr images with semantic search. Ecommerce — Ecommerce website using disjunctive facets, range and rating filtering, and pagination. Home Booking A…
read the full Meilisearch overview →
About Quickwit
Open source search engine for observability (logs, traces, and soon metrics!). Quickstart Docs Tutorials Chat Download We just released Quickwit 0.8! Read the blog post to learn about the latest powerful features! Quickwit is the fastest search engine on cloud storage. It's the perfect fit for observability use cases Log management Distributed tracing Metrics support is on the roadmap 🚀 Quickstart Search and analytics on Stack Overflow dataset Trace analytics with Grafana Distributed tracing with Jaeger 💡 Features Full text search and aggregation queries Elasticsearch compatible API, use Quickwit with any…
read the full Quickwit overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Meilisearch or Quickwit more popular?
Meilisearch has 59,758 GitHub stars and Quickwit has 11,760. Meilisearch has the larger community by that measure.
Are Meilisearch and Quickwit free?
Both are open source. Meilisearch has no licence declared in this registry, and Quickwit is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Meilisearch and Quickwit?
Meilisearch is written in Rust and Quickwit in Rust. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Meilisearch or Quickwit?
Choose Meilisearch if you want the larger community (59,758 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose Quickwit if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.