Compare Algolia vs Elasticsearch
vs Meilisearch vs Typesense
The table below gives you a practical side-by-side comparison of key features and tradeoffs, based on each search engine's public documentation.
We've strived to keep it accurate, but if you notice an issue, please open one here.
Explore the focused comparisons: Algolia, Elasticsearch, and Meilisearch. For a direct comparison between the hosted search product and the broader data platform, read Algolia vs Elasticsearch.
Overview
| Typesense | Algolia | Elasticsearch | Meilisearch | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Source Code | Fully open source under GPL-3.0 | Proprietary closed source | Free portions offer AGPLv3, SSPL, or Elastic License 2.0. The default distribution and X-Pack remain under Elastic License 2.0 | Community Edition is open source and MIT-licensed, Enterprise Edition is source-available licensed under Business Source License (BUSL) |
| First Commit | 2015 | 2012 | 2010 | 2018 |
| Built Using | C++ | C++ | Java | Rust |
| Core Search Algorithm | Built from the ground-up | Built from the ground-up | Built on top of Lucene | Built from the ground-up |
| Best Suited For | Instant Search-as-you-type Experiences for data sets that can fit in RAM, up to 24 TB (or current commercially available RAM size). | Instant Search-as-you-type Experiences for datasets up to 128 GB in size. | General-purpose search & aggregations over petabyte-scale datasets (eg: log data) | Instant Search-as-you-type Experiences for use cases that don't require a highly-available fault-tolerant setup. Recommends providing enough RAM to hold entire dataset in RAM for ideal performance. |
| Primary Index Location | Search index in RAM; source documents and unindexed fields on disk | RAM | Lucene segments on disk, with filesystem cache in RAM | Disk, with RAM used as a cache |
| Pricing Model | Free to self-host. Typesense Cloud bills dedicated clusters hourly by RAM and CPU configuration, plus bandwidth, without per-search or per-record charges. The full pricing catalog is public. | Build Plan is free to get started. Grow Plan and Grow Plus Plan bill search requests and records; Elevate Plan requires an annual contract with bespoke pricing. | Free Basic tier for self-hosting. Elastic Cloud offers resource-based Hosted plans and usage-based Serverless pricing. | Free, feature-restricted Community Edition for self-hosting. Meilisearch Cloud publishes single-node estimates, while HA and Enterprise configurations use bespoke pricing available through its sales team. |
Deployment
| Typesense | Algolia | Elasticsearch | Meilisearch | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Self-Hosted Option | ||||
| SaaS Option | ||||
| High Availability / Fault Tolerance | Raft-based multi-node clustering with automatic leader election | Managed three-server Raft clusters that prioritize search availability | Primary shards with replica copies and automatic replica promotion | 🔶 HA and sharding are offered in the BUSL-licensed Enterprise Edition or Meilisearch Cloud. The MIT Community Edition is single-node. One static leader handles writes, and a failure requires manual promotion before writes resume. Has known limitations around fault tolerance, recovery and resilience. |
| GPU Acceleration Support | Can optionally use a GPU when available. | Can optionally use a GPU when available. | ||
| CDN-like Geo-Distributed clusters | Typesense Cloud's Search Delivery Network supports up to 7 regions per cluster from 26 choices, with nearest-node routing | Available in the paid Distributed Search Network add-on | 🔶 Elastic Cloud Hosted supports up to three availability zones within one region. Geo-distribution requires separate deployments plus cross-cluster search or replication, with teams configuring the remote clusters and regional routing topology. | 🔶 Enterprise replication supports geographically routed reads, but optimal routing is not currently available when sharding and replication are combined. |
| Runtime Dependencies | None. Self-contained C++ binary. Built-in high performance HTTP server that backends and public clients can connect to directly using search-only scoped API keys. | N/A, since it's SaaS only | Requires the JVM. Elastic's own guidance says Elasticsearch is not designed to be publicly accessible, so public applications normally use a backend or reverse proxy. | None. Self-contained binary. Built-in high performance HTTP server, that can be exposed to the frontend directly. Recommends use of nginx, apache or the like as a reverse proxy in front, to manage the renewal of the SSL certificate |
| Index Backward Compatibility | Fully backward compatible | N/A As a SaaS service, Algolia does not expose this detail to end users. | Backward compatible up to 1 major version. | Fully backward compatible |
| Upgrade Path | Replace binary, restart process. | Managed SaaS service, doesn't require upgrades. | Replace binary, restart process. Re-indexing required if upgrading more than 1 major version. | Replace binary, restart process with upgrade option. |
| Serverless Offering | Typesense is a persistent in-memory process that requires an uninterrupted runtime, RAM, and persistent disk. | Algolia operates managed, stateful three-server clusters behind the service. | Elastic Cloud Serverless | Meilisearch is a persistent process with memory-mapped storage. Standard Meilisearch Cloud runs on provisioned compute. |
Features
| Typesense | Algolia | Elasticsearch | Meilisearch | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| REST API | ||||
| Typo Tolerance | Opt-in per query with the fuzziness parameter, not enabled by default, for performance reasons. | |||
| Query Field Weights & Boosting | 🔶 Partially through ranking rules reordering, numeric weights are not supported | 🔶 Partially supported through ranking rules reordering, numeric weights are not supported | ||
| Scoped API Keys & Multi-tenant indices | API keys can carry index restrictions. Document-level security is available on paid tiers. | |||
| Federated Multi-Index Search | ||||
| Grouping / Distinct | Up to one distinct field | 🔶 Up to one distinct field, no support for grouping | ||
| JOINs across multiple indices | 🔶 ES|QL supports LOOKUP JOIN; Elasticsearch also has join field types | |||
| Dynamic Sorting | Sort fields can be defined at query time using a single index | 🔶 Each exhaustive sort order needs a duplicate index, multiplying billable records and cost. Relevant sorting can use virtual replicas, with a subset of settings and limits. | Sort fields can be defined at query time using a single index | Sort fields need to be defined upfront, but can be changed at query time, using a single index. |
| Faceting & Filtering | ||||
| Ranking on Filter Scores | ||||
| Facet Value Searches | ||||
| Result Pinning / Merchandising | 10 rules per index on Grow Plan; 10,000 per index on Grow Plus Plan and Elevate Plan | Pinned query included in the free Basic distribution | 🔶 Experimental, pinning-only search rules. Three rules per Cloud project are free; additional rules are a paid add-on. | |
| Synonyms | Up to 10,000 per index | |||
| Dynamic Synonym Suggestions | ||||
| Language support | All languages | All languages | All languages | All languages |
| Stop words | ||||
| Stemming | ||||
| Geo Search | Supports multiple geopoints and geo-polygons | Limited to one geo point per document | Limited to one geo point per document | |
| Automatic Record ID generation | IDs need to be pre-generated | |||
| Sort by String field | Up to 3 tie-breaking sort fields per search query | But not recommended | ||
| Search Analytics | Client-side and Server-side | Client-side and Server-side | Only through the cloud offering | |
| Record Schema Validations | with coerced mapping | |||
| Schemaless | Automatic schema detection or a strict schema. | with coerced mapping | ||
| Custom Ranking Rules | ||||
| Negative Keyword Search ( -query) | ||||
| Phrase Search ( "some query") | ||||
| Vector Search (Nearest-Neighbor Search) | While direct vector search is not available, NeuralSearch combines keyword and vector search and is available on higher plan tiers. | |||
| Semantic Search | Called NeuralSearch and is available on higher plan tiers. | semantic_text is generally available; ELSER requires a paid subscription tier | ||
| Natural Language Search | Built in. Uses an LLM to translate natural-language requests into structured search terms, filters, and sort parameters. | |||
| Similarity Search | ||||
| Image Search | Built-in integration with CLIP for object detection | |||
| Voice Search | Built-in integration with Whisper for audio clip transcription | |||
| Conversational Search / RAG | Built-in RAG pipeline with OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Google, Cloudflare Workers AI, and vLLM | Agent Studio is generally available and connects supported LLMs to Algolia search and tools | Agent Builder is an Enterprise-tier feature in self-managed Elasticsearch and Elastic Cloud. | 🔶 Experimental /chats endpoint |
| Recommendations | Not out-of-the-box, but can be implemented using Vector Search | Not out-of-the-box, but can be implemented using Vector Search | Not out-of-the-box, but can be implemented using Vector Search | |
| User-level Search Personalization | Not out-of-the-box, but can be implemented using Vector Search. | Available on higher tiers | Not out-of-the-box, but can be implemented using Vector Search | |
| Collection Aliases | ||||
| Collection Swapping | ||||
| A/B Testing Results | Can be implemented by swapping collections and search parameters based on AB Test Bucket | Available from Grow Plan | Can be implemented by swapping collections and search parameters based on AB Test Bucket | Can be implemented by swapping collections and search parameters based on AB Test Bucket |
| Query Suggestions | ||||
| Visual Dashboard | In Typesense Cloud | Kibana | Search tools in self-hosted deployments, with analytics in Meilisearch Cloud | |
| Site Crawler | Self-hosted DocSearch crawler for docs sites. | Hosted DocSearch crawler for docs sites. | DocSearch crawler for docs sites. | |
| Search UI Component Library | The Typesense InstantSearch adapter supports JavaScript, React, Vue, React Native, and Angular | InstantSearch.js | Search UI, requires hosted search | Forked version of InstantSearch.js |
| Privacy Friendliness | Does NOT collect usage analytics or personal data in both Self-Hosted and SaaS options. | 🔶 Collects personal data, usage analytics & IP addresses. | 🔶 Collects personal data, hardware information, RAM used, unique fingerprint ID for licensing. | 🔶 Collects hardware information, total number of documents, number of document updates, server uptime, search settings, etc. Opt-out supported. |
Limits
| Typesense | Algolia | Elasticsearch | Meilisearch | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of Documents | No limitation, only constrained by available RAM | Unknown | No limitation, only constrained by available disk space | No limitation, constrained by available disk space and performance is constrained by available RAM. |
| Maximum Number of Indices | No limitation | Plan-dependent: 10 on Build Plan, 50 on Grow Plan, and up to 1,000 on top tiers | No limitation | No limitation |
| Maximum Index Size | No limitation, only constrained by available RAM | 100 GB per application; 1 GB on Build Plan | No limitation | No limitation, only constrained by available disk |
| Maximum Words per field | No limitation | No limitation | No limitation | No limitation |
| Maximum Record Size | No limitation | 10 KB to 100 KB, depending on plan; 10 KB on Build Plan | No limitation | No limitation |
| Number of API Keys | No limitation | 5000 | No limitation | No limitation |
Support
| Typesense | Algolia | Elasticsearch | Meilisearch | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Channels | GitHub issues Public Slack Community Phone Private Slack Paid Prioritized Support | GitHub issues Public Slack Community Phone Paid Prioritized Support | GitHub issues Public Slack Community Paid Prioritized Support | GitHub issues Public Discord Community Phone Private Slack Paid Prioritized Support |
| Support Hours | Critical Production Support: 24/7/365 on Typesense Cloud for all users. General support: 24/7/365 for paid prioritized support users. Response SLAs depend on the support tier you choose. | Grow Plan, Grow Plus Plan, and Elevate Plan include weekday business-hours web support. Elevate Plan can add 24/7 coverage for P0 and P1 incidents. | 24/7/365 for Platinum and Enterprise prioritized support | Standard: Mon-Thu, 8am-10pm Paris time. Paid prioritized support: 24/7/365 |
| Expert Onboarding & Training | Through Paid Support | Through Paid Support |
