vioscale
Comparison

Elasticsearch vs Meilisearch

No clear leader: Meilisearch (64.5) and Elasticsearch (60.0) are within the 5-point margin; treat as a tie. The attribute-by-attribute breakdown below, with a source and date on every value, is the honest way to compare them.

Elasticsearch full profile →Meilisearch full profile →
Machine formatsJSONMarkdownGraphQLor send Accept: application/json
Elasticsearch60
Meilisearch65
Score
Vioscale score
Elasticsearch60 / 100medium · 50%
Meilisearch65 / 100medium · 73%
Pricing
Free tier
Elasticsearch✓
Meilisearch✓
Model
Elasticsearchcommercial
Meilisearchcommercial
Price level
Elasticsearchlow
Meilisearchmid
Transparent
Elasticsearch✗
Meilisearch✓
Integrations
Count
Elasticsearch25
Meilisearch23
Security
Disclosure policy
Elasticsearch–
Meilisearch✓
Gdpr
Elasticsearch–
Meilisearch✓
Scorecard
Elasticsearch6.9
Meilisearch–
Soc2
Elasticsearch–
Meilisearch✓
Vulnerabilities
Reliability
Sla pct
Elasticsearch–
Meilisearch99.999
Status page
Elasticsearch✓
Meilisearch✓
Adoption
Dependent repos
Elasticsearch18,551
Meilisearch0
Github stars
Elasticsearch77,862
Meilisearch59,100
Activity
Commits last 30d
Elasticsearch100
Meilisearch89
Release
Cadence days
Elasticsearch–
Meilisearch4
History
Elasticsearch20 items
Meilisearch20 items
Language
Primary
ElasticsearchJava
MeilisearchRust
Market
Availability

Capabilities

Feature-by-feature on the axes that matter for search engines. “-” means undocumented, not absent.

Deployment
Deployment
ElasticsearchSelf-hosted
MeilisearchManaged
Architecture
Index engine
ElasticsearchLucene
Meilisearch-
Query
Query DSL (JSON / SQL / params / GraphQL)
ElasticsearchES|QL
Meilisearch-
Faceting & filtering
ElasticsearchYes
MeilisearchYes
Geo search
Elasticsearch✓
Meilisearch✓
Relevance
Typo tolerance / fuzzy
ElasticsearchBuilt-in
Meilisearch-
Relevance tuning
ElasticsearchLearning-to-rank
Meilisearch-
Vector
Vector / hybrid search
ElasticsearchDense + lexical fusion
MeilisearchDense + lexical fusion
Scale
Distributed / horizontal scale
ElasticsearchSharded
MeilisearchSharded
Multi-tenancy (indexes / collections / tenants)
Elasticsearch✓
Meilisearch✓
Ingest
Real-time indexing
ElasticsearchNear-real-time
Meilisearch-
Workload
Log / analytics workload
Elasticsearch✓
Meilisearch✓
Licensing
Licence class
ElasticsearchSource-available (SSPL / Elastic)
MeilisearchPermissive OSS

What each one is

The product in its own terms, so the numbers below have context.

Elasticsearch

A search and analytics platform that ingests, stores, and searches structured, unstructured, and vector data in real time. Supports full-text search, vector search, observability analytics, and security event analysis through a unified REST API and query language.

Independently observed

Meilisearch

An open-source search engine built for speed and relevance, providing full-text search, semantic understanding through AI embeddings, and hybrid retrieval that integrates easily into websites and applications with sub-50-millisecond response times.

Independently observed

Pricing

List pricing as published by each vendor, with the date we read it. Always verify at the source before you buy.

Elasticsearch

free|open_source|quoteFree tier14-day trial

Free open-source tier; Platinum and Enterprise tiers available on request

  • Free and OpenFree
    • Distributed vector and search engine
    • Full-text, semantic, and vector search
    • Kibana interface for querying and visualization
    • Native authentication and TLS encryption
    • Basic monitoring via Stack Monitoring
    • +3 more
  • PlatinumContact sales
    • Everything in Free plus:
    • Single sign-on (SSO), LDAP/Active Directory
    • Field and document-level security
    • Audit logging
    • Machine learning anomaly detection
    • +4 more
  • EnterpriseContact sales
    • Everything in Platinum plus:
    • Searchable snapshots on low-cost object storage (up to 80% cost reduction)
    • Attack Discovery (GenAI security)
    • Universal Profiling for application performance
    • Cross-cluster search with advanced API-key security
    • +6 more
as of verify ↗

Meilisearch

from $30/moHybridFree tier14-day trial

From $30/month for cloud. Free 14-day trial or self-hosted open-source option.

  • Build$30/month for 50,000 searches and 100,000 documents
  • Pro$300/month for 250,000 searches and 1,000,000 documents
  • EnterpriseContact sales
    • Volume discounts
    • Premier SLA support
    • Resource-based pricing option
as of verify ↗

Platform & deployment

Where each product runs and how it can be hosted. A dash means undocumented, not unsupported.

Platforms
Web
Elasticsearch✓
Meilisearch✓
CLI
Elasticsearch✓
Meilisearch✓
Deployment
Cloud / SaaS
Elasticsearch✓
Meilisearch✓
Self-hosted
Elasticsearch✓
Meilisearch✓
On-premise
Elasticsearch✓
Meilisearch✗
Air-gapped
Elasticsearch✓
Meilisearch✗

Integrations

What each product connects to. Counts come from the vendor's own integration directory where one exists.

Elasticsearch

25 total
  • Slack
  • Jira
  • ServiceNow
  • PagerDuty
  • Microsoft Teams
  • IBM Resilient
  • xMatters
  • GitHub
  • Jina AI
  • NVIDIA AI
  • Prometheus
  • Grafana
  • AWS Bedrock
  • Sarvam AI
  • Google ADK
  • LlamaParse
  • Mistral
  • Elastic Agent
  • Beats
  • Logstash
  • Filebeat
  • Metricbeat
  • Heartbeat
  • Webhooks
  • +1 more
Independently observed

Meilisearch

23 total
  • JavaScript
  • TypeScript
  • Python
  • PHP
  • Ruby
  • Go
  • Rust
  • Java
  • .NET
  • Swift
  • Dart
  • Laravel
  • Rails
  • Symfony
  • Strapi
  • Firebase
  • React
  • Vue
  • Angular
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • meilisync
  • MCP
Independently observed

Comparison generated from independently-sourced facts. Every value links to its source and retrieval date. See the method.