Sphinx Alternatives

Sphinx reviews and mentions

• Manticore Search: Fast, efficient, drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch
  11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Jul 2025

  Im a fan of manticore and promote it when I can, but this doesn't seem like an approoriate response. It appears generous on the surface, but has various unnecessary and subtle digs in it - all while it would be easy to show how manticore is a more appropriate choice.

  They're surely not using a 20-year-old version of Sphinx - it appears that the latest open source version on Github is 8 years old. They have a closed source version which appears to be maintained, though has infrequent releases.

  Why not just say these things, which make manticore self-evidently a better choice?

  https://github.com/sphinxsearch/sphinx

• Sphinx – open-source Search Engine
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 19 May 2025
• Searchcode – search 75B lines of code from 40M projects
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Apr 2024
• Revisiting site search + SQLite as a search engine
  2 projects | dev.to | 6 Apr 2023

  Sphinx - https://sphinxsearch.com

• Best 5 Ecommerce Search Engines for Developers
  4 projects | dev.to | 23 Feb 2023

  Sphinx is a search engine that can be integrated into a website to provide advanced search functionality such as full-text, Boolean, and faceted search. It is a powerful open-source search engine that can handle large amounts of data and quickly return results.

• Question about embedding for search vs clustering applications
  1 project | /r/GPT3 | 21 Feb 2023

  Have been using Sphinx. It does some processing around suffixes, tenses, and so on, and looks at word proximity (BM25), but is definitely limited.

• grep like search with preprocessing
  4 projects | /r/linux | 12 Dec 2022

  Lucene is the thing you think you need. Elastic Search is a nice wrapper for it. But these are Java, so maybe you want Sphinx Search (C++) or MeiliSearch (Rust).

• Search MySQL table for multiple keywords and return number of occurrences for each keyword per row
  1 project | /r/PHPhelp | 7 Aug 2022

  Using a natural language search will almost certainly be a better solution and PHP may not be the best tool for this task. Figure out how you are going to get the text out of the PDF and where you are going to put it. Look at things like sphinx and full text search in boolean mode for doing the keyword matching.

• How to do a Scryfall-like search?
  1 project | /r/howdidtheycodeit | 29 Jul 2022

  In practice though you don't do any of this, you get a library to do it for you. I've used Sphinx Search in the past for some fairly hefty (In the order of terabytes), and there's a good book covering how to get it all set up and started.

• Manticore: a faster alternative to Elasticsearch in C++ with a 21-year history
  2 projects | dev.to | 28 Jul 2022

  Five years ago Manticore began as a fork of an open source version of the once popular search engine Sphinx Search. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, three C++ developers, a support engineer, a power user of Sphinx Search / backend team lead, an experienced manager, a mother of five helping us part-time, and a ton of bugs, crashes, and technical debts. So we got a shovel and other digging tools and started working to get it up to the search engine industry standards. Not that Sphinx was impossible to use, but many things were missing, and existing features weren’t quite stable or mature. And we had pushed it about as far as we could. So after 5 years and hundreds of new users, we’re ready to say that Manticore Search can be used as an alternative to Elasticsearch for both full-text search and (now) data analytics too.

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  www.saashub.com | 16 Jun 2026

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