Algolia or Meilisearch: the search that converts

On a catalogue, marketplace, or large site, search is not a detail: slow or imprecise search means lost sales. Two tools dominate instant search, Algolia and Meilisearch.

Why use a dedicated search engine

A SQL database’s “LIKE %word%” search isn’t enough once the catalogue grows: no typo tolerance, no relevance, no speed. A dedicated engine indexes your data and responds in milliseconds, with autocomplete, typo handling, faceting, and sorting.

One numeric reference helps decide whether the subject warrants a dedicated tool. A search feels instantaneous below roughly 100 milliseconds; beyond that the user waits, and the next keystroke arrives before the previous response. On a website, that delay adds to page load time, for which Google’s recommended Largest Contentful Paint threshold is 2.5 seconds at the 75th percentile. The useful test is not run on the vendor’s home page: it is run on your own catalogue, with your real queries, typos, product references and two-character searches included, since those are exactly where a SQL search collapses.

Algolia: the managed reference

Algolia is powerful, fast, and feature-rich (search analytics, A/B testing, personalisation). It’s a managed service: zero infrastructure to handle. The trade-off is the cost, which rises with search and record volume, and hosting with a third party.

Algolia’s billing model deserves understanding before committing, because it works on two dimensions at once. According to its pricing page, the service bills search requests and indexed records: the free tier covers 10,000 requests a month and 50,000 records, then overages are charged per thousand, $0.50 per additional 1,000 search requests, $0.40 per 1,000 records. Two practical consequences. Search-as-you-type mechanically multiplies requests, unless debounced on the client. And a catalogue split into variants inflates the record count far faster than the product count.

Meilisearch: open source and sovereign

Meilisearch delivers the essentials of high-quality instant search, fast, typo-tolerant, easy to integrate, open source and self-hostable. A French player, it lets you keep the index on your own infrastructure, and costs far less at high volume.

The licensing distinction deserves precision, because it underpins the sovereignty argument. The community edition of Meilisearch is published under the MIT licence, freely usable in production, commercial use included, while the enterprise edition falls under a commercial licence. The project claims results displayed in under 50 milliseconds, with typo tolerance, facets, synonyms and hybrid search. A managed offering exists to avoid running it yourself, which puts the choice back on the right ground: it is not “managed versus self-hosted”, it is “where your data lives and who operates the service”.

How to choose

• Algolia if you want the most comprehensive managed solution, with advanced analytics, without cost or sovereignty constraints.
• Meilisearch for sovereignty, cost control, or solid search needs without Algolia’s pricing.

Search is a cornerstone of the marketplaces and large catalogues we develop.

A project where search matters? We’ll help you pick the right tool.