An alternative to Elasticsearch that runs on a few MBs of RAM

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  1. MeiliSearch

    A lightning-fast search engine API bringing AI-powered hybrid search to your sites and applications.

    Projects like Meili Search are already coming for Elastic Search's lunch: https://www.meilisearch.com. I think there is a market for fast, light weight alternatives like Meili that offers up a fully featured open source experience.

    With Elastic Search many of the features, security being one, are locked away behind commercial licenses. With Meili it seems they are, for the time being anyway, going with a proper open source version. I understand Elastic needs to earn money, and I get their licensing model to accomplish this. But Meili will probably steal away a good portion of customers interested in self hosting their search solution.

  2. Nutrient

    Nutrient – The #1 PDF SDK Library, trusted by 10K+ developers. Other PDF SDKs promise a lot - then break. Laggy scrolling, poor mobile UX, tons of bugs, and lack of support cost you endless frustrations. Nutrient’s SDK handles billion-page workloads - so you don’t have to debug PDFs. Used by ~1 billion end users in more than 150 different countries.

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  3. Typesense

    Open Source alternative to Algolia + Pinecone and an Easier-to-Use alternative to ElasticSearch ⚡ 🔍 ✨ Fast, typo tolerant, in-memory fuzzy Search Engine for building delightful search experiences

    True, but most deployments are also just generic searching of records like Algolia rather than using all the low-level functionality.

    Tyoesense is probably the most compete competitor in that regard: https://typesense.org/

  4. manticoresearch

    Easy to use open source fast database for search | Good alternative to Elasticsearch now | Drop-in replacement for E in the ELK soon

    > you might look at sphinx search engine

    Manticore Search [1] forked from the latest open source version and has been continually improved for more than 5 years.

    [1] https://manticoresearch.com/

    > although it doesn't has as much features as ES has

    Manticore unlike Sphinx is much closer to Elasticsearch in terms of features set.

  5. quickwit

    Cloud-native search engine for observability. An open-source alternative to Datadog, Elasticsearch, Loki, and Tempo.

    Quickwit is a search engine built on top of Tantivy (by the author of Tantivy): https://github.com/quickwit-oss/quickwit

    Quickwit supports Elasticsearch compatible bulk indexing API.

  6. sonic

    🦔 Fast, lightweight & schema-less search backend. An alternative to Elasticsearch that runs on a few MBs of RAM.

    - Sonic (https://github.com/valeriansaliou/sonic)

    There isn't enough out there comparing all these for the simple typical fuzzy search/search box usecase -- which I think is 80% of people doing search today.

    Like other people are pointing out, most of these engines won't have all the features of ES (or more accurately Lucene) but I am pretty convinced that most of the time it doesn't actually matter and if someone is searching on your site excessively maybe there's a problem with your UX (unless you're a search engine or repository of information).

    [0]: https://supabase.com/blog/postgres-full-text-search-vs-the-r...

  7. Toshi

    A full-text search engine in rust

    You're right I should put bleve on there as well. This isn't even the whole list. Toshi (https://github.com/toshi-search/Toshi) is also out there...

  8. tantivy

    Tantivy is a full-text search engine library inspired by Apache Lucene and written in Rust

    My favorite, and the closest one to ElasticSearch (for its features) is probably Tantivy.

    I'd recommend anyone to check up this three projects and choose on what best fits your needs... it's awesome to see that more projects are becoming available by the day!

    [1]: https://github.com/quickwit-oss/tantivy

    [2]: https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch

  9. CodeRabbit

    CodeRabbit: AI Code Reviews for Developers. Revolutionize your code reviews with AI. CodeRabbit offers PR summaries, code walkthroughs, 1-click suggestions, and AST-based analysis. Boost productivity and code quality across all major languages with each PR.

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  10. orama

    🌌 A complete search engine and RAG pipeline in your browser, server or edge network with support for full-text, vector, and hybrid search in less than 2kb.

  11. OpenSearch

    🔎 Open source distributed and RESTful search engine.

  12. zinc

    Discontinued ZincSearch. A lightweight alternative to elasticsearch that requires minimal resources, written in Go. [Moved to: https://github.com/zinclabs/zinc] (by prabhatsharma)

  13. bayard

    A full-text search and indexing server written in Rust.

    Somewhat related, this guy: https://github.com/mosuka/ seems to be very passionate about search service.

    He built two distributed search services:

    - https://github.com/mosuka/phalanx, written in Go.

    - https://github.com/mosuka/bayard, written in Rust.

  14. phalanx

    Phalanx is a cloud-native distributed search engine that provides endpoints through gRPC and traditional RESTful API.

    Somewhat related, this guy: https://github.com/mosuka/ seems to be very passionate about search service.

    He built two distributed search services:

    - https://github.com/mosuka/phalanx, written in Go.

    - https://github.com/mosuka/bayard, written in Rust.

  15. smyrna

    Prosty konkordancer dla języka polskiego

    I've written a full-text search engine as well. I don't tout it as a replacement for Elasticsearch, but it does have a few advantages: it's fast; supports HTML documents; supports Polish inflection (via a full-blown morphological dictionary, not just a stemmer); and has a very compact on-disk format (pre-parsed HTML trees, Huffman-encoded over large alphabets). Oh, and it's 100% Clojure.

    It underlies a GUI called Smyrna: https://github.com/nathell/smyrna, https://smyrna.danieljanus.pl

    I haven't touched it in six years, other than a few small changes. But I do plan on revisiting it when time permits.

  16. search-benchmark-game

    Search engine benchmark (Tantivy, Lucene, PISA, ...)

    This is very very difficult, but Tantivy tried: see https://github.com/quickwit-oss/search-benchmark-game

  17. bleve

    A modern text/numeric/geo-spatial/vector indexing library for go

    I would be interested in such a testbed. I would also like to know how Bleve Search (https://github.com/blevesearch/bleve) turns out.

    I have for many years now a small search engine project in my free-time pipeline, but I'm before crawling even and I intend to sit for searching part after some of that.

  18. zincsearch

    ZincSearch . A lightweight alternative to elasticsearch that requires minimal resources, written in Go.

  19. OpenSearch-Dashboards

    📊 Open source visualization dashboards for OpenSearch.

  20. perftop

    📈 PerfTop: A client for the OpenSearch Performance Analyzer

  21. riot

    Discontinued Go Open Source, Distributed, Simple and efficient Search Engine; Warning: This is V1 and beta version, because of big memory consume, and the V2 will be rewrite all code. (by go-ego)

  22. groonga

    An embeddable fulltext search engine. Groonga is the successor project to Senna.

  23. Apache Solr

    Apache Lucene and Solr open-source search software

  24. nevod

    Nevod is a language and technology for pattern-based text search.

  25. Searx

    Discontinued Privacy-respecting metasearch engine

  26. okon

    Fast offline searching for SHA-1 keys in Have I Been Pwned databases

  27. algolite

    An Implementation of Algolia to emulate its REST API

  28. quickwit

    Discontinued Quickwit is a fast and cost-efficient distributed search engine for large-scale, immutable data. [Moved to: https://github.com/quickwit-oss/quickwit] (by quickwit-inc)

  29. bluge

    indexing library for Go

  30. blast

    Discontinued Blast is a full text search and indexing server, written in Go, built on top of Bleve.

  31. docker

    Official docker for Manticore Search (by manticoresoftware)

  32. lyra

    Discontinued 🌌 Fast, in-memory, typo-tolerant, full-text search engine written in TypeScript. [Moved to: https://github.com/LyraSearch/lyra] (by nearform)

  33. lucene

    Apache Lucene open-source search software

  34. solr

    Apache Solr open-source search software

  35. konnu

  36. beir

    A Heterogeneous Benchmark for Information Retrieval. Easy to use, evaluate your models across 15+ diverse IR datasets.

    There are actually benchmarks that allow measuring search relevancy objectively, e.g. BEIR[1]. Manticore Search team did an effort to make a PR to include it to the list. The results are here [2]. Unfortunately the BEIR team seems to be too busy to review a whole pile of PRs including about Vespa. Nevertheless it would be nice to have both Meilisearch and Typesense there too since it's interesting what performance those non-tf-idf based search engines would show compared to BM25-based and vector search engines.

    [1] https://github.com/beir-cellar/beir

  37. go-elasticsearch

    The official Go client for Elasticsearch

  38. elasticsearch-py

    Official Python client for Elasticsearch

  39. Weaviate

    Weaviate is an open-source vector database that stores both objects and vectors, allowing for the combination of vector search with structured filtering with the fault tolerance and scalability of a cloud-native database​.

    + Weaviate for vector based search. Has a BSD-3 license. https://weaviate.io/developers/weaviate/current/

  40. Milvus

    Milvus is a high-performance, cloud-native vector database built for scalable vector ANN search

  41. sanic

    Accelerate your web app development | Build fast. Run fast.

  42. SaaSHub

    SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

    SaaSHub logo
NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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