Search is an integral part of most applications today. Adding a fast, accurate and easy-to-use search function can greatly improve your users‘ experience. Thankfully, you don‘t need an army of developers or outrageous licensing fees to make this happen.
In this guide, I will cover 8 open source, self-hosted search engines that can supercharge search on your website or application.
1. MeiliSearch
MeiliSearch is one of the best modern search engines due to:
- Open source code that can be customized
- An excellent search experience right out of the box
- Easy to set up and scale on demand
It‘s fast, typo-tolerant and supports multiple languages. The documentation is also top-notch. For most applications, MeiliSearch is all you‘ll ever need for search.
2. Solr
Solr is a highly mature enterprise search platform trusted by companies like Netflix, eBay and Zappos. Reasons to use Solr:
- Extremely powerful and accurate search capabilities
- Built on the reliable Lucene library
- Comes with an admin interface for monitoring
It‘s blazing fast, scalable and has an extensive list of features. While Solr is made for large deployments, you can run simpler single-machine setups as well.
3. Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch pioneered the concept of distributed, document-oriented search. It‘s advantages are:
- Battle-tested code and strong community
- Excellent clustering, scalability and speed
- Simple REST API and multiple client libraries
- Top-class documentation for developers
The main downside is high memory usage, so smaller applications may want to look elsewhere. But for enterprise search, Elasticsearch remains a top choice.
4. Typesense
Typesense focuses on providing a fast search experience without complexity. Key features:
- Lightning-fast yet full featured
- Typo tolerant and advanced filtering
- Serverless cloud option available
- Easy to set up HA clusters
For most small to medium sites, Typesense hits the sweet spot between speed, accuracy and ease of use.
5. Sonic
Sonic is an alternative search engine written in Rust for blazing speed and tiny memory footprint. It‘s main advantages are:
- Extremely low memory usage
- Very fast indexing and query performance
- Supports 40+ languages out of the box
- Easy client libraries for integration
If you have memory constraints or need lightweight search, check out Sonic. It‘s limitations are reasonable and well documented.
6. TNTSearch
TNTSearch is an excellent PHP-based search engine perfect for PHP applications. Key highlights:
- Written and optimized for PHP
- Important features like fuzzy search built-in
- Easy to swap indexes on demand
- Composer ready for simple install
For PHP developers, TNTSearch allows staying within the PHP ecosystem for better efficiency. It‘s fast, accurate and easy to work with.
7. Vespa
Vespa is a heavy-duty search engine designed for big data and machine learning use cases. It shines when:
- Processing large volumes of data
- Real-time ingestion and querying
- Heavy customization is needed
- Leveraging machine learning models
For large scale systems, Vespa is an excellent choice. But smaller apps may find it overkill. Integration is Java-based.
8. Alpine Search
Alpine Search is a newcomer focused on providing an easy yet extensible search experience via plugins. Key aspects:
- Easy 5 minute setup with Docker
- Extensible front-end UI and admin
- REST API and plugin architecture
- Typesense under the hood
For simple search needs with potential to grow, Alpine Search strikes a nice balance. It‘s easy to work with and customize.
Conclusion
Adding search to apps doesn‘t need to be hard or expensive anymore. All the open source engines listed above can help supercharge search on your website or application.
I encourage you to try them out on a test server and see which one meets your needs best! Search is too important a feature to neglect.
