Meilisearch
Best for self-hosting
Why teams pick it
Control your scheduling stack on your own infrastructure.
Open-source alternatives to Elasticsearch
Compare community-driven replacements for Elasticsearch in search engines workflows. We curate active, self-hostable options with transparent licensing so you can evaluate the right fit quickly.
Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch provides scalable indexing and real-time search across text, logs, metrics, and events. It supports full-text relevance, aggregations, vector search for semantic use cases, geo queries, and time-series analysis, with clustering, sharding/replication, and rich APIs for powering applications and observability.Read more
Key stats
- 14Alternatives
- 3Support self-hosting
Run on infrastructure you control
- 13Active development
Recent commits in the last 6 months
- 9Permissive licenses
MIT, Apache, and similar licenses
Counts reflect projects currently indexed as alternatives to Elasticsearch.
Start with these picks
These projects match the most common migration paths for teams replacing Elasticsearch.
Vespa
Privacy-first alternative
Why teams pick it
Keep customer data in-house with privacy-focused tooling.
All open-source alternatives
Meilisearch
Lightning-fast search engine with hybrid AI-powered search capabilities
Self-host friendlyActive developmentPrivacy-firstRust
Why teams choose it
- Hybrid search combining semantic and full-text search with sub-50ms response times
- Typo-tolerant search with faceted filtering, sorting, and geosearch capabilities
- Multi-tenancy and API key security for fine-grained access control
Watch for
Enterprise features like sharding require commercial licensing
Migration highlight
Ecommerce Product Discovery
Customers find products instantly using faceted filters, price ranges, ratings, and typo-tolerant search across large catalogs
FlexSearch
Blazing-fast full-text search for browsers and Node.js
Active developmentPermissive licenseIntegration-friendlyJavaScript
Why teams choose it
- Up to 1,000,000× faster query performance
- Persistent indexes with multi-database support
- Parallel workers for scalable indexing and searching
Watch for
Higher memory usage compared to minimal libraries
Migration highlight
E‑commerce product catalog search
Customers receive instant, typo-tolerant results with highlighted matches, improving conversion rates.
Lunr.js
Client-side full-text search library for fast, offline queries
Permissive licenseIntegration-friendlyJavaScript
Why teams choose it
- Full‑text search support for 14 languages
- Boost terms at query time or whole documents at index time
- Scope searches to specific fields
Watch for
Limited to client‑side memory; large indexes can be impractical
Migration highlight
Documentation site search
Visitors locate API pages instantly without server queries
ZincSearch
Lightweight full-text search engine, drop-in Elasticsearch alternative
Active developmentIntegration-friendlyAI-powered workflowsGo
Why teams choose it
- Single binary, cross‑platform installation
- Elasticsearch API compatibility for ingestion and search
- Built‑in Vue UI with authentication
Watch for
No built‑in high availability
Migration highlight
Add search to a SaaS product
Users can instantly find documents, emails, or records via full‑text queries
Vespa
Real-time AI-powered search and recommendation at any scale
Self-host friendlyActive developmentPermissive licenseJava
Why teams choose it
- Real-time vector and tensor search with built-in ranking models
- Scalable, fault-tolerant architecture handling billions of documents
- Integrated machine‑learning inference at query time
Watch for
Self‑hosting requires distributed‑systems expertise
Migration highlight
E‑commerce product search with personalized ranking
Delivers sub‑100 ms results combining text relevance, vector similarity, and real-time user behavior models.
Pa
ParadeDB
PostgreSQL-powered search engine for real‑time analytics and update‑heavy workloads.
Active developmentFast to deployIntegration-friendlyRust
Why teams choose it
- Elasticsearch‑compatible query syntax with BM25 ranking
- Real‑time indexing; updates are searchable instantly
- Hybrid search combining full‑text and vector similarity
Watch for
Requires PostgreSQL 14 or newer
Migration highlight
E‑commerce product catalog search
Customers find relevant products instantly, with up‑to‑date inventory reflected in search results.
Quickwit
Fast, cloud-native search engine for logs and traces
Active developmentPermissive licenseIntegration-friendlyRust
Why teams choose it
- Sub‑second search on cloud storage (S3, Azure, GCS)
- Elasticsearch‑compatible API for seamless migration
- Jaeger and OpenTelemetry native ingestion
Watch for
Metrics support is still on the roadmap
Migration highlight
Centralized log analysis for microservices
Ingest logs from Kubernetes via Fluent Bit, query across all services in sub‑second time, and reduce storage costs.
SeekStorm
Sub-millisecond full-text search library with real-time indexing
Active developmentPermissive licenseFast to deployRust
Why teams choose it
- Sub‑millisecond latency with SIMD‑accelerated ranking
- True real‑time incremental indexing without merge pauses
- Built‑in faceted, geo‑proximity, and multi‑field sorting
Watch for
Memory‑mapped index may require ample RAM for hot data
Migration highlight
E‑commerce product catalog search
Customers receive sub‑10 ms filtered and sorted results, boosting conversion rates.
OpenSearch
Scalable search and observability platform for unstructured data
Active developmentPermissive licenseIntegration-friendlyJava
Why teams choose it
- Distributed architecture for horizontal scaling
- Elasticsearch‑compatible REST APIs
- Built‑in analytics and observability plugins
Watch for
Operational complexity can be high for beginners
Migration highlight
E‑commerce Product Search
Delivers fast, relevant results across millions of catalog items, improving conversion rates.
Sonic
Fast, lightweight, schema-less search backend returning IDs in microseconds
Active developmentPermissive licenseFast to deployRust
Why teams choose it
- Microsecond query latency with ~30 MB RAM usage
- Schema‑less identifier indexing for external data retrieval
- Built‑in typo correction and real‑time auto‑completion
Watch for
Only returns IDs; no document storage
Migration highlight
Chat message lookup
Instantly retrieve message IDs matching user queries, enabling fast conversation search.
Typesense
Fast, typo-tolerant search engine with built-in AI features
Active developmentIntegration-friendlyAI-powered workflowsC++
Why teams choose it
- Typo tolerance with instant, sub‑50 ms latency
- Built‑in vector, semantic, and hybrid search
- Single‑binary deployment, no runtime dependencies
Watch for
Memory usage can be high for very large indexes
Migration highlight
E‑commerce product browsing
Customers find items instantly with typo tolerance, price sorting, and facet filters.
TNTSearch
PHP-native full-text search engine with real-time indexing
Self-host friendlyActive developmentPermissive licensePHP
Why teams choose it
- Fuzzy and boolean search with configurable Levenshtein distance
- Dynamic index updates without full reindex
- Built-in multilingual stemming and custom tokenizer support
Watch for
Relies on SQLite for index storage, may not scale to massive datasets
Migration highlight
Search TV show catalog
Instant, typo-tolerant lookup of titles and descriptions for a streaming interface.
Apache Solr
Blazing-fast multi-modal search platform built on Apache Lucene
Active developmentPermissive licenseFast to deployJava
Why teams choose it
- Multi-modal search supporting full-text, vector, and geospatial queries
- Native Kubernetes support with official Solr Operator for cloud-native deployments
- SolrCloud mode for distributed, fault-tolerant search clusters
Watch for
Java-based stack requires JVM expertise for optimization
Migration highlight
E-commerce Product Catalog Search
Enable customers to find products through full-text queries, faceted navigation, and geospatial filtering for location-based inventory
Manticore Search
Fast open-source database built for high-performance search
Active developmentIntegration-friendlyAI-powered workflowsC++
Why teams choose it
- SQL-first with MySQL protocol compatibility and clients in 8+ languages
- Modern multithreading with automatic query parallelization across CPU cores
- Row-wise and columnar storage options for datasets from MB to TB scale
Watch for
Not fully ACID-compliant; supports isolated transactions but lacks complete transactional guarantees
Migration highlight
High-volume log analytics
Process and search massive log streams 29x faster than Elasticsearch with lower hardware costs and real-time query performance
Choosing a search engines alternative
Teams replacing Elasticsearch in search engines workflows typically weigh self-hosting needs, integration coverage, and licensing obligations.
- 3 projects let you self-host and keep customer data on infrastructure you control.
- 13 options are actively maintained with recent commits.
Tip: shortlist one hosted and one self-hosted option so stakeholders can compare trade-offs before migrating away from Elasticsearch.