Best Self Hosted Alternatives to Elastic Cloud (Elasticsearch)

Meilisearch is an open-source search engine designed to add fast, relevant full-text search to applications and websites with minimal configuration. It provides a developer-friendly API and emphasizes “search-as-you-type” experiences with typo tolerance and built-in relevance features.

Key Features

• Typo-tolerant, relevance-based full-text search optimized for instant “as-you-type” UX
• REST API (and official client SDKs) for indexing, searching, and administration
• Filtering, faceting, sorting, and pagination for building rich search UIs
• Highlighting and crop (snippet) support for presenting results
• Synonyms and stop-words management to tune relevance
• Configurable ranking rules and searchable/displayed attributes
• Multi-index support and asynchronous task processing for indexing operations
• Security options such as API keys to control read/write/search permissions

Use Cases

• Add site search to documentation, blogs, and marketing websites
• Power product/content search in web and mobile applications (e-commerce, listings)
• Implement application search for internal tools with filters and facets

Limitations and Considerations

• Not designed as a general-purpose database; data must be indexed and kept in sync from a source of truth
• Advanced distributed/cluster features are not the primary focus compared to some enterprise search stacks

Meilisearch fits teams that want a straightforward, high-performance search backend with strong out-of-the-box relevance and simple operational overhead. It is commonly used as a lighter alternative to heavier search platforms when fast integration and good default search quality are priorities.