Introducing the Meilisearch Enterprise Edition license

We’d like to share an important announcement: Meilisearch is moving to a dual licensing model to better serve both our community and enterprise users.

Meilisearch has been an open source project from the beginning, and it is thanks to our users and community that we have come this far, which is why it’s important to emphasize that we’re not abandoning open source.

Open source remains at the heart of Meilisearch. This licensing change simply allows us to grow sustainably while keeping core innovations free and accessible. Major developments in our search engine will continue to be part of the open source engine, and we will also continue to build and support our developer SDKs.

This new license is part of a broader strategic effort that enables us to enhance our enterprise and cloud offering. Being able to engage with large business willing to pay for our technology will enable us to continue building in the open and supporting the community.

Why a new license?

Our vision for the enterprise license is to serve business needs while ensuring open source remains fully accessible for developers.

The enterprise license will be limited exclusively to features that are only relevant to large businesses with advanced security and observability needs.

In particular, these are features that:

• Target large-scale deployments with lots of data – such as sharding
• Dramatically increase ROI or boost conversion rates – such as analytics
• Provide new and enhanced security-related capabilities – such as fine-grained access controls

To be more transparent, the new license also allows us to delve deeper into experimental product features more freely and also aligns with our strategic roadmap. Here’s how we think it’s going to help our business:

• Open up opportunities in new verticals where customers need to self-host due to complex security concerns or regulations
• Provide a path for large enterprises already self-hosting at scale to gain more value. For example, there are massive companies with 200+ Meilisearch servers that we believe could benefit from enterprise-ready features and dedicated support – we want to better serve them with these new offerings.
• Create a clear separation: open source for developers, and the enterprise edition for larger businesses with specific security, scale, and ROI requirements

This new license comes as a part of version 1.19, and as we move forward, we’d like to highlight that we will continue to work closely with the community to iterate on this license and the pricing model that comes with it.

In conclusion: What’s changing?

We’re now going to have two licenses:

• Community Edition (CE) → Remains fully open source (MIT). Everything developers need to build and experiment, available at no cost.
• Enterprise Edition (EE) → Enterprise-grade features under the Business Source License (BUSL), designed for scaling, advanced security, and observability.

Our goal is simple: Keep Meilisearch open source and free of charge, while also meeting the needs of enterprise customers who rely on Meilisearch at massive scale. We want to work towards a future where developers and businesses both thrive with Meilisearch.