[opensourcedex]

Meilisearch is a free, open source search engines project written in Rust and released under a custom open-source licence. It has 59,758 GitHub stars, 2,786 forks and 321 open issues, and was last pushed 20 hours ago. On this registry it ranks #2 of 8 tracked projects in Search Engines, with 5 head-to-head comparisons available. It gained 313 stars over the last 30 tracked days.

Meilisearch — Lightning-fast search for your applications

What is Meilisearch?

What it is

Meilisearch is an open-source search engine built in Rust that delivers fast, relevant search results for applications and websites. It operates as a standalone service with a RESTful HTTP API, designed to integrate directly into existing data pipelines without requiring major architectural changes.

It solves the problem of slow, inaccurate, or overly complex search implementations by providing a ready-to-use engine that handles full-text, typo-tolerant, faceted, and hybrid (semantic + keyword) search out of the box. This eliminates the need to build and maintain custom search infrastructure or rely on expensive third-party solutions.

Key capabilities

  • Hybrid search combining semantic and full-text retrieval for improved relevance
  • Sub-50ms response times for real-time, search-as-you-type user experiences
  • Typo tolerance with configurable sensitivity for misspelled queries
  • Filtering and faceted search with support for multi-value attributes and ranges
  • Geosearch with distance-based filtering and sorting using geographic coordinates
  • Synonym support to expand query coverage and improve recall
  • Multi-tenancy via tenant tokens for secure, isolated search across users or organizations

Who uses it and how

  • Ecommerce platforms use faceted search to let users filter products by price, brand, rating, and availability
  • Streaming services like Where2Watch use hybrid search to match user intent with movie titles and platforms
  • SaaS applications implement multi-tenant search for CRM data, isolating contacts and deals per user
  • Image repositories like Flickr deploy semantic search to find visually or contextually similar images
  • Booking sites use natural language queries to match holiday rental descriptions with user intent

Getting started

Meilisearch is available as a Docker image (getmeili/meilisearch), via Homebrew (brew install meilisearch), and as a downloadable binary. It runs standalone with optional configuration via environment variables or a config file. Meilisearch Cloud is also offered as a managed hosted option.

When to use it — and when not to

Meilisearch replaces paid search services like Algolia or Elasticsearch for applications needing fast, accurate search without complex tuning. It requires self-hosting infrastructure including disk storage for indexes and memory for performance; no external database is needed. It does not include built-in authentication, so security must be implemented at the application layer. Its experimental vector search feature lacks the maturity of dedicated vector databases like Pinecone or Weaviate.

project readme (upstream, from github) — read inline

Website | Roadmap | Meilisearch Cloud | Blog | Documentation | FAQ | Discord

Dependency status License Merge Queues enabled

⚡ 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 conversational search demo for finding holiday rentals using natural language.
  • Search Playground — An interactive playground to explore Meilisearch search features.
  • Personalization — A demo showcasing personalized search results tailored to individual users.
  • SaaS — Search for contacts, deals, and companies in this multi-tenant CRM application.

See the list of all our example apps in our demos repository.

✨ Features

  • Hybrid search: Combine the best of both semantic & full-text search to get the most relevant results
  • Search-as-you-type: Find & display results in less than 50 milliseconds to provide an intuitive experience
  • Typo tolerance: get relevant matches even when queries contain typos and misspellings
  • Filtering and faceted search: enhance your users' search experience with custom filters and build a faceted search interface in a few lines of code
  • Sorting: sort results based on price, date, or pretty much anything else your users need
  • Synonym support: configure synonyms to include more relevant content in your search results
  • Geosearch: filter and sort documents based on geographic data
  • Extensive language support: search datasets in any language, with optimized support for Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, and languages using the Latin alphabet
  • Security management: control which users can access what data with API keys that allow fine-grained permissions handling
  • Multi-Tenancy: personalize search results for any number of application tenants
  • Highly Customizable: customize Meilisearch to your specific needs or use our out-of-the-box and hassle-free presets
  • RESTful API: integrate Meilisearch in your technical stack with our plugins and SDKs
  • Conversational search: let users ask questions in natural language and get AI-generated answers grounded in your search results
  • Personalization: tailor search results to individual users based on their preferences and behavior
  • Search rules: define custom rules to dynamically adjust search behavior based on context
  • Document relations: link documents across indexes to enrich search results with related data
  • Replication & sharding: scale horizontally by distributing your data across multiple nodes
  • AI-ready: works out of the box with LangChain and the Model Context Protocol (MCP)
  • Easy to install, deploy, and maintain

📖 Documentation

You can consult Meilisearch's documentation at meilisearch.com/docs.

🚀 Getting started

For basic instructions on how to set up Meilisearch, add documents to an index, and search for documents, take a look at our documentation guide.

🌍 Supercharge your Meilisearch experience

Say goodbye to server deployment and manual updates with Meilisearch Cloud. Additional features include analytics & monitoring in many regions around the world. No credit card is required.

🧰 SDKs & integration tools

Install one of our SDKs in your project for seamless integration between Meilisearch and your favorite language or framework!

Take a look at the complete Meilisearch integration list.

Logos belonging to different languages and frameworks supported by Meilisearch, including React, Ruby on Rails, Go, Rust, and PHP

⚙️ Advanced usage

Experienced users will want to keep our API Reference close at hand.

We also offer a wide range of dedicated guides to all Meilisearch features, such as filtering, sorting, geosearch, API keys, and tenant tokens.

Finally, for more in-depth information, refer to our articles explaining fundamental Meilisearch concepts such as documents and indexes.

🧾 Editions & Licensing

Meilisearch is available in two editions:

🧪 Community Edition (CE)

  • Fully open source under the MIT license
  • Core search engine with fast and relevant full-text, semantic or hybrid search
  • Free to use for anyone, including commercial usage

🏢 Enterprise Edition (EE)

  • Includes advanced features such as:
    • Sharding
    • S3-streaming snapshots
  • Governed by a commercial license or the Business Source License 1.1
  • Not allowed in production without a commercial agreement with Meilisearch.
    • You may use, modify, and distribute the Licensed Work for non-production purposes only, such as testing, development, or evaluation.

Want access to Enterprise features? → Contact us at sales@meilisearch.com.

📦 External crates

Meilisearch vendors the following MIT-licensed external crates with code modifications to use the HTTP client located in crates/http-clients:

  • external-crates/async-openai and external-crates/async-openai-macros from
  • external-crates/reqwest-eventsource from

📊 Telemetry

Meilisearch collects anonymized user data to help us improve our product. You can deactivate this whenever you want.

To request deletion of collected data, please write to us at privacy@meilisearch.com. Remember to include your Instance UID in the message, as this helps us quickly find and delete your data.

If you want to know more about the kind of data we collect and what we use it for, check the telemetry section of our documentation.

📫 Get in touch!

Meilisearch is a search engine created by Meili, a software development company headquartered in France and with team members all over the world. Want to know more about us? Check out our blog!

🗞 Subscribe to our newsletter if you don't want to miss any updates! We promise we won't clutter your mailbox: we only send one edition every two months.

💌 Want to make a suggestion or give feedback? Here are some of the channels where you can reach us:

Thank you for your support!

👩‍💻 Contributing

Meilisearch is, and will always be, open-source! If you want to contribute to the project, please look at our contribution guidelines.

📦 Versioning

Meilisearch releases and their associated binaries are available on the project's releases page.

The binaries are versioned following SemVer conventions. To know more, read our versioning policy.

Differently from the binaries, crates in this repository are not currently available on crates.io and do not follow SemVer conventions.

Frequently asked questions

Is Meilisearch free to use?

Meilisearch is open source. There is no licence fee and no seat count — you can self-host it or, where the project offers one, pay a vendor for a managed version instead.

What does Meilisearch do?

Lightning-fast search for your applications

What is Meilisearch written in?

Meilisearch is primarily written in Rust. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch, and it has 59,758 GitHub stars.