Meilisearch vs Typesense: Which Search Engine?

Quick Verdict

Both are excellent. Meilisearch is easier to get started with and has better documentation. Typesense handles larger datasets more efficiently and offers built-in high availability clustering. For most self-hosters adding search to a project, Meilisearch is the simpler choice. For production workloads with millions of documents, Typesense scales better.

Overview

Meilisearch and Typesense are both open-source, typo-tolerant search engines designed as alternatives to Algolia and Elasticsearch. Both deliver sub-50ms search results and are dramatically simpler to operate than Elasticsearch.

Meilisearch — Written in Rust. 56k GitHub stars. MIT license (community edition). Created by Meili. Latest version: v1.35.1 (February 2026).

Typesense — Written in C++. 25k GitHub stars. GPL-3.0 license (server). Created by Typesense Inc. Latest version: v30.1 (January 2025).

Feature Comparison

Feature	Meilisearch	Typesense
Language	Rust	C++
Typo tolerance	Yes	Yes
Search speed	<50ms	<50ms
Faceted search	Yes	Yes
Filtering	Yes	Yes
Sorting	Yes	Yes
Geo search	Yes	Yes
Hybrid search (vector + text)	Yes (v1.3+)	Yes
Semantic/vector search	Yes	Yes
Conversational search (RAG)	No	Yes (built-in)
Multi-tenancy	Yes (tenant tokens)	Yes (API key scoping)
Clustering/HA	No (single node)	Yes (Raft-based)
API style	REST	REST
API key auth	Yes	Yes
Official SDKs	JS, Python, PHP, Ruby, Go, Rust, Java, Swift, Dart	JS, Python, PHP, Ruby, Go, Java, Rust, Dart, Swift
Default port	7700	8108
Docker image	getmeili/meilisearch	typesense/typesense
License	MIT (CE) / BSL 1.1 (Enterprise)	GPL-3.0

Installation Complexity

Both are single-binary services that are straightforward to deploy with Docker.

Meilisearch:

services:
  meilisearch:
    image: getmeili/meilisearch:v1.35.1
    container_name: meilisearch
    ports:
      - "7700:7700"
    volumes:
      - meili_data:/meili_data
    environment:
      - MEILI_MASTER_KEY=your-master-key-min-16-chars
      - MEILI_ENV=production
    restart: unless-stopped

volumes:
  meili_data:

Typesense:

services:
  typesense:
    image: typesense/typesense:30.1
    container_name: typesense
    ports:
      - "8108:8108"
    volumes:
      - typesense_data:/data
    command: >
      --data-dir /data
      --api-key=your-api-key-here
      --enable-cors
    restart: unless-stopped

volumes:
  typesense_data:

Both are equally simple to deploy for a single node. Typesense uses command-line flags rather than environment variables for configuration, which is slightly less conventional for Docker but works fine.

Performance and Resource Usage

Meilisearch uses disk-based storage (LMDB, memory-mapped). Only the portions of the index being actively queried are loaded into RAM. This means Meilisearch can handle datasets much larger than available memory — up to ~80 TiB theoretically, with best performance under 2 TiB. Indexing uses up to 2/3 of available RAM by default (configurable). Good for large datasets when RAM is limited.

Typesense keeps its entire index in RAM for maximum search speed. A fresh instance uses ~30 MB, and 1 million Hacker News titles consume ~165 MB. Expect 2-3x the size of your searchable fields in RAM usage. A 4-vCPU machine handles 46-104 concurrent searches per second. The trade-off: your dataset size is limited by available RAM.

This is the fundamental architectural difference. Meilisearch handles larger datasets on less RAM. Typesense is faster for datasets that fit in memory but can’t exceed it. For most self-hosting use cases (under 1M documents), both perform well.

Community and Support

Meilisearch: 56k stars, 200+ contributors, very active development. Excellent documentation with interactive examples. Commercial cloud offering (Meilisearch Cloud). Active Discord community.

Typesense: 25k stars, active development. Good documentation. Commercial cloud offering (Typesense Cloud, serving 10B+ searches/month). Active Slack community.

Meilisearch has the larger open-source community. Both have responsive teams and regular releases.

Use Cases

Choose Meilisearch If…

• You want the easiest setup experience with great defaults
• Your dataset is under a few million documents
• You need comprehensive documentation and tutorials
• You want the MIT license (no copyleft concerns)
• You’re building a search-as-you-type experience
• You need multi-language support (CJK, Hebrew, etc.)

Choose Typesense If…

• You need high availability with built-in clustering
• Your dataset is large (millions of documents)
• Memory efficiency matters for your infrastructure
• You want built-in conversational/RAG search
• You need to handle high concurrent query loads
• You’re building a production search service at scale

Final Verdict

Meilisearch is the better starting point for most self-hosters. The documentation is outstanding, the defaults are sensible, and you can go from zero to working search in minutes. The MIT license makes it easy to integrate into any project.

Typesense is the better choice for production-scale search. Built-in Raft clustering, lower memory usage per document, and higher concurrent query throughput make it the stronger option when reliability and scale matter. The GPL-3.0 license may be a consideration for commercial projects.

If you’re adding search to a personal project, blog, or documentation site — start with Meilisearch. If you’re building search infrastructure for an application serving real users — evaluate Typesense.

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• Best Self-Hosted Search Engines
• Replace Google Search
• Docker Compose Basics
• Getting Started with Self-Hosting