Search

Self-hostable / open source

• ★ Meilisearch — fast, typo-tolerant, easy to deploy. Hosted plan free tier; self-host is straightforward.
• ★ Typesense — same niche as Meilisearch; faster on big indexes for some workloads. Free self-host; cheap managed cloud.
• OpenSearch — Elasticsearch fork; powerful, heavyweight.
• Elasticsearch — back to a permissive license; still the heavyweight choice.
• Sonic — minimal, fast, very lightweight. Great for hobby projects.
• Quickwit — log + search, Rust, distributed.

In-DB full-text

• Postgres full-text search with tsvector + pg_trgm — covers 80% of use cases without a separate service.
• Postgres + pgvector for embeddings; pgvectorscale for very large vector workloads.
• SQLite FTS5 + libsql — surprisingly capable for app-tier search.

Hosted (free tier)

• Algolia — gold standard for instant search UX; free tier is small but real.
• Pinecone — vector DB; small free tier.

Browser / static

• ★ Pagefind — static-site search, runs entirely in the browser (no server). Used by many docs sites.
• Orama — full-text + vector that runs in the browser, Workers, or Node. Hybrid in-memory and on-disk modes.
• Lunr / MiniSearch / Fuse.js — older, smaller, in-browser.

Pick this if…

• Default app search, self-host: Meilisearch.
• Already on Postgres, simple search: Postgres FTS or pgvector.
• Static site / docs: Pagefind.
• Need instant-search UX, don't mind paying: Algolia.
• Vector / embeddings at scale: pgvector (small) or Pinecone / Qdrant / Milvus (large).