Who maintains Meilisearch?

Meilisearch is maintained by the Meilisearch team, together with more than 259 contributors to the core engine. Development happens in public on GitHub, from issues and pull requests to product discussions and the roadmap.

Should I self-host Meilisearch or use Meilisearch Cloud?

Self-hosting is free and gives you full control, but you manage upgrades, backups, scaling and monitoring yourself. Meilisearch Cloud is fully managed by the team that builds the engine, with automatic upgrades, sharding and replication available as an enterprise add-on, SOC 2 Type II compliance and up to a 99.999% uptime SLA. Most teams start on Meilisearch Cloud and never need to self-host.

Is Meilisearch Cloud the same engine as the open source version?

Yes. Meilisearch Cloud runs the same open source engine, with Enterprise Edition features such as sharding and replication available as an add-on, so you can move from a self-hosted instance to Cloud without rewriting your integration.

How can I contribute to Meilisearch?

Start with an issue labeled "good first issue" on GitHub, improve one of our SDKs or integrations, share feedback in product discussions, or join the community on Discord.

Meilisearch loves open source

The #1 open source search and discovery engine

Meilisearch started as an open source project in 2018 and it still is at its heart. The same engine powers Meilisearch Cloud, the managed service run by the team that maintains it. We maintain the engine, the libraries it is built on, and SDKs for every major language, in public, with our community.

Star us on GitHub Explore our projects

Maintained in the open, every day

Open source is not a side project for us. These numbers come straight from GitHub and refresh daily.

59,443

GitHub stars

on meilisearch/meilisearch

259

Contributors

to the core engine

1,180

Pull requests merged

across the org, last 12 months

500

Issues closed

across the org, last 12 months

Engine releases

stable versions, last 12 months

Public repositories

actively maintained

Followed by leading companies

Engineers at the world's top tech companies, AI labs and enterprises follow Meilisearch on GitHub.

Our best open source projects

The engine is just the start. We maintain the libraries it is built on and the integrations you use with it.

meilisearch/meilisearch

The search engine

A lightning-fast search engine API bringing AI-powered hybrid search to your sites and applications.

59.4Kstars

View on GitHub

Rust libraries

Building blocks we extracted from the engine and maintain for the whole Rust ecosystem.

heed

Fully typed LMDB wrappers with minimum overhead.

Rust915

charabia

The multilingual tokenizer Meilisearch uses to segment and normalize queries and documents.

Rust360

arroy

Approximate nearest neighbors search based on random projections and LMDB, optimized for memory.

Rust312

deserr

Deserialization library with a focus on precise, user-friendly error messages.

Rust51

grenad

Tools to sort, merge, write and read immutable key-value pairs.

Rust26

cellulite

Embedded geospatial database built on top of LMDB.

Rust18

Official SDKs

First-party clients kept in sync with every Meilisearch release.

JavaScript

JavaScript and TypeScript client for browsers and Node.js.

TypeScript870

PHP

PHP client, the foundation of our Laravel Scout driver.

PHP757

Go

Idiomatic Go client for the Meilisearch API.

Go680

Python

Python client with sync and async support.

Python603

Rust

Async Rust client for the Meilisearch API.

Rust431

Ruby on Rails

Drop-in Meilisearch integration for Rails models.

Ruby358

.NET

.NET client for C# and F# applications.

C#345

Java

Java client for JVM applications.

Java245

Tools & integrations

Everything around the engine: AI agents, frontends, scrapers and deployment.

InstantSearch plugins

Use Meilisearch with InstantSearch, Autocomplete and your favorite frontend frameworks.

TypeScript532

docs-scraper

Scrape any documentation website into a Meilisearch index.

Python347

Kubernetes

Helm charts and manifests to run Meilisearch on Kubernetes.

Helm278

Strapi plugin

Index your Strapi collections into Meilisearch in a few clicks.

JavaScript245

Meilisearch MCP

A Model Context Protocol server to let LLMs and agents drive Meilisearch.

Python197

meilisearch-importer

A CLI to import massive CSV and NDJSON files into Meilisearch.

Rust42

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Our open source commitments

How we maintain Meilisearch and the projects around it, so you can build on them with confidence.

MIT-licensed Community Edition

The Community Edition of the engine has been MIT licensed since 2018, and so are our SDKs and libraries. Enterprise features like sharding are clearly separated under their own license.

Frequent, predictable releases

We ship small, frequent releases so fixes and features reach you fast, with migration notes and a clear changelog for each version.

Contributions get reviewed

Core engineers triage issues and review community pull requests. Labels like "good first issue" make it easy to get started.

Responsible security

A public security policy, coordinated disclosure through GitHub security advisories, and fast patch releases.

A public roadmap

Product discussions happen in the open. Vote on ideas, follow what ships next and shape the engine with us.

We give back upstream

When the ecosystem lacks a piece, we build it and open source it: heed, charabia and arroy power projects far beyond Meilisearch.

Meilisearch Cloud

Trust the team that builds Meilisearch to run it for you

Self-hosting is free, but you own the upgrades, backups, scaling and on-call. Meilisearch Cloud is the same open source engine, fully managed by the people who maintain it, so your team can focus on the search experience.

Start 14-day free trial Compare with self-hosting

No credit card required.

Run by the makers
Cloud is operated by the same team that builds and maintains the open source engine.
Automatic upgrades
Get every new release without managing migrations or backups yourself.
Scale when you need it
Sharding and replication are available as an enterprise add-on, configured by our team.
Built for production
SOC 2 Type II certified, with up to a 99.999% uptime SLA.

Frequently asked questions

Yes. The Meilisearch Community Edition is open source under the MIT license, and so are our official SDKs and Rust libraries like heed, charabia and arroy. Enterprise Edition features such as sharding and replication are distributed under the Business Source License 1.1.

Build Meilisearch with us

Pick a good first issue, share feedback on the product roadmap, or come say hi on Discord. Every contribution counts.

Find a good first issue Join our Discord