Open source search projects
Every project in the registry tagged search, ranked by real GitHub adoption.
Lightning-fast search for your applications
Privacy-first metasearch across 270+ sources
🦔 Fast, lightweight & schema-less search backend. An alternative to Elasticsearch that runs on a few MBs of RAM.
Open-source search and analytics at enterprise scale
Lightning-fast open source search engine for big data
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28344. The end of web parsing. The beginning of scalable pixel-native search. link: https://pixelrag.ai/
Full-text & vector search at the edge.
SoTA production-ready AI retrieval system. Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with a RESTful API.
Browser extension for reverse image search, available for Chrome, Edge and Safari
Open-source message stream built on Postgres
📊 Open source visualization dashboards for OpenSearch.
Bichon – A lightweight, high-performance Rust email archiver with WebUI
Full-text search API with real-time indexing and crawling
A lightweight log analytic and data visualize platform built on clickhouse.
⚡️ A fully-featured and blazing-fast JavaScript API client to interact with Algolia.
Compressed Log Processor (CLP) is a free log management tool capable of compressing logs and searching the compressed logs without decompression.
Fast, stateless CLI for web search and scrape. Built for AI agents.
⚡️ A fully-featured and blazing-fast PHP API client to interact with Algolia.
🍁 Sycamore is an LLM-powered search and analytics platform for unstructured data.
Related tags
Frequently asked questions
How many open source search projects are there?
This registry tracks 19 projects tagged search, with 194,036 GitHub stars between them. The most-adopted is Meilisearch at 59,750 stars.
Are these search projects free to use?
Yes — 17 of the 19 carry an explicit open-source licence across 5 distinct licences, so there is no licence fee. Where a project also sells a hosted or enterprise version, the self-hosted path remains free.
Which search project should I choose?
The list above is ranked by GitHub stars, but stars measure attention rather than fit. Check three things on each card: the licence (permissive versus copyleft), the language it is written in, and the last-push date — a high-star project that has not been pushed in a year is a liability.
Are these search projects still maintained?
15 of the 19 were pushed in the last 90 days, and every card shows its exact last-push date so you can see the rest. Sort your shortlist by that date before committing to a migration.