Developers wanting fast, relevant search as you type and hybrid semantic search inside their applications.

Meilisearch is an open source search engine offering instant full text search, filtering, and AI powered hybrid search via a REST API.

Self hosted as a binary or Docker container, or used through Meilisearch Cloud, with SDKs for many languages.

First released around 2018 and actively maintained with frequent releases as of 2026.

Gives applications sub 50ms search as you type experiences plus semantic retrieval without the complexity of Elasticsearch.

Requires the Meilisearch server and optionally an embedding source for hybrid semantic search.

Community edition is open source under MIT, enterprise features use a commercial or Business Source License; can be self hosted or run via paid Meilisearch Cloud.