The best Search infrastructure
Every option ranked — open-source, self-hostable, and commercial — by our transparent Sovereignty Score, with honest trade-offs so you choose what fits you, not us.
The search box in your own product: typo tolerance, faceting, ranking and speed. Hosted search bills per thousand requests, which scales with traffic rather than value.
L3Infrastructure — layer 3 of the AI stack- 1
Meilisearch
Top pickOpen sourceGreat search out of the box, on one small server.
Free and open source to self-host. Meilisearch Cloud is paid, from a small monthly tier. · in our Algolia comparison →
What is Meilisearch? →88sovereignty - 2
Sonic
Open sourceA search index in about 30 MB of RAM, when you need less than you think.
Free and open source. Runs in around 30 MB of RAM. · in our Algolia comparison →
What is Sonic? →94sovereignty - 3
Typesense
Open sourceGPL-3.0 search with no enterprise asterisk, tuned for speed.
Free and open source to self-host. Typesense Cloud is paid, priced per hour of running capacity. · in our Algolia comparison →
What is Typesense? →93sovereignty - 4
Manticore Search
Open sourceSQL-native full-text search that is unusually fast on modest hardware.
Free and open source to self-host. Managed service available. · in our Algolia comparison →
What is Manticore Search? →92sovereignty - 5
OpenSearch
Open sourceThe Apache-2.0 Elasticsearch fork — when search is only half the job.
Free and open source. Managed OpenSearch is available from AWS and others. · in our Algolia comparison →
What is OpenSearch? →91sovereignty
Replacing a specific tool?
Head-to-head comparisons for each popular search infrastructure product.
Straight head-to-heads
Two search infrastructure tools, side by side — verified facts and a plain verdict.