Meilisearch is a search engine for websites and applications, available as self-hosted software or a cloud service. Full-text search includes automatic typo tolerance and relevance ranking, while hybrid search combines keyword precision with semantic understanding. It also provides RAG infrastructure with hybrid retrieval and LangChain support. Its search options include faceted, federated, multimodal, personalized, and conversational search. Meilisearch supports more than 30 languages through automatic language detection and smart tokenization. Official SDKs, plugins, and integrations cover languages and frameworks including JavaScript, Python, PHP, Ruby, Go, Rust, Java, .NET, Swift, and Dart. The company says results return in under 50 milliseconds for typical workloads. Self-hosting is free under the MIT license, with infrastructure, updates, backups, and scaling managed by the user. Cloud starts at $20/mo and offers usage- or resource-based billing, email support, and a 14-day free trial. Enterprise pricing is custom; listed benefits include dedicated resources and Slack support.
Who it is for
Meilisearch suits developers adding search to websites or applications, from use cases such as e-commerce and SaaS to media, knowledge bases, and enterprise search. Teams can choose to manage a self-hosted deployment or use the cloud service.
What is good
- Full-text search includes automatic typo tolerance.
- Hybrid search combines keyword and semantic retrieval.
- Supports more than 30 languages.
- Available for self-hosting or as cloud SaaS.
- Self-hosted option has no usage limits.
What to know first
- Self-hosting requires managing infrastructure and updates.
- Self-hosted users also manage backups and scaling.
- Cloud starts at $20/mo.
- Enterprise pricing is custom.
Verdict
Meilisearch offers multiple search approaches and deployment choices, with a free self-hosted option and paid cloud service. Self-hosting shifts infrastructure and maintenance work to the user, while cloud pricing starts at $20/mo.
Meilisearch plans and pricing
All plansCompared on search databases
- Free plan
- Yes
- Paid from
- $20/mo
- Primary search mode
- full-text
- Vector search
- Yes
- Faceted search
- Yes
- Deployment
- both
- Query interface
- REST
