Algolia vs MeiliSearch: What are the differences?

Introduction

Algolia and MeiliSearch are both search engines that allow developers to integrate powerful search capabilities into their applications. While they serve a similar purpose, there are key differences between the two that set them apart. Here, we will explore six specific differences between Algolia and MeiliSearch.

1. Hosting Options: Algolia offers a hosted solution, where the search engine is fully managed and hosted on their infrastructure. This relieves the developer from the operational and maintenance tasks associated with the search engine. On the other hand, MeiliSearch is a self-hosted search engine, which means developers have to set up and manage their own infrastructure to run and maintain MeiliSearch.

2. Data Indexing: Algolia uses an incremental indexing approach, where data is indexed in real-time as it is added or updated. This ensures that search results are always up to date, giving users the most relevant results. MeiliSearch, on the other hand, uses a batch indexing approach, where data needs to be indexed in batches. This can result in a slight delay in search results being updated with new or modified data.

3. Scalability: Algolia has been designed to handle high amounts of traffic and large datasets. With its distributed architecture and ability to automatically scale, Algolia can handle millions of queries per second and billions of records. MeiliSearch, while being a performant search engine, is more suitable for smaller applications and datasets as it may not handle extremely high traffic or large datasets as efficiently as Algolia.

4. Search Features: Algolia offers a wide range of powerful search features out-of-the-box, including typo tolerance, faceting, filtering, and personalization. These features are highly configurable and allow developers to fine-tune the search experience for their users. MeiliSearch, on the other hand, provides a simplified search experience and doesn't offer as many advanced search features by default. However, it does provide the flexibility for developers to implement custom search features.

5. Language Support: Algolia has extensive language support and offers features like language-specific stopwords and synonyms. This makes it easy to build multilingual search experiences that are optimized for different languages. MeiliSearch, while supporting multiple languages, does not offer as many language-specific features out-of-the-box as Algolia.

6. Community and Ecosystem: Algolia has an active and supportive community, with a wide range of resources and documentation available. It also has integrations with popular frameworks and libraries, making it easier for developers to integrate Algolia into their applications. MeiliSearch, while gaining popularity, has a smaller community and ecosystem compared to Algolia, which means there may be fewer resources and integrations available.

In summary, Algolia provides a fully managed, scalable, and feature-rich search engine that is suitable for large-scale applications, while MeiliSearch offers a more lightweight and customizable search engine that is well-suited for smaller applications.