head to head · open source
Meilisearch vs Typesense
Meilisearch has 59,758 GitHub stars, 2,786 forks, 321 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Typesense has 27,076 stars, 1,024 forks, 879 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Meilisearch leads on adoption by 121% (59,758 vs 27,076 stars). Meilisearch is written in Rust under a custom or non-standard licence; Typesense is written in C++ under GPL-3.0. Meilisearch has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, Typesense 4%. Meilisearch was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 6 topic tags (enterprise-search, faceting, full-text-search, fuzzy-search), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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 | Typesense | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 60K | ★ 27K |
| License | Custom / other | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Rust | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.8K | ⑂ 1.0K |
| 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 Typesense if
- You want the Typesense feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and Typesense 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 Typesense
Typesense is a fast, typo tolerant search engine for building delightful search experiences. An Open Source Algolia Alternative & An Easier to Use ElasticSearch Alternative Website Documentation Roadmap Slack Community Community Threads Twitter ✨ Here are a couple of live demos that show Typesense in action on large datasets: Search a 32M songs dataset from MusicBrainz: songs search.typesense.org Search a 28M books dataset from OpenLibrary: books search.typesense.org Search a 2M recipe dataset from RecipeNLG: recipe search.typesense.org Search 1M Git commit messages from the Linux Kernel: linux commits…
read the full Typesense overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Meilisearch or Typesense more popular?
Meilisearch has 59,758 GitHub stars and Typesense has 27,076. Meilisearch has the larger community by that measure.
Are Meilisearch and Typesense free?
Both are open source. Meilisearch has no licence declared in this registry, and Typesense is licensed under GPL-3.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Meilisearch and Typesense?
Meilisearch is written in Rust and Typesense in C++. 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 Typesense?
Choose Meilisearch if you want the larger community (59,758 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose Typesense if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.