Apache Solr vs Meilisearch

Apache Solr is a free, open-source, self-hosted search platform built on Apache Lucene. It provides full-text, vector, geospatial, and hybrid search through a REST query interface. Documents can be sent over HTTP as JSON, XML, CSV, or binary, with results returned in those formats. Matching supports phrases, wildcards, joins, and grouping; discovery tools include faceting, autocomplete, spelling suggestions, hit highlighting, and result clustering. Solr distributes indexing, replicates data, balances queries, and supports automated failover and recovery. Apache Tika integration extracts rich content such as PDF and Microsoft Word files. Its administrative interface controls instances and exposes cluster state, logs, threads, and metrics. Listed security capabilities include SSL, authentication, and role-based authorization. Solr runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, with API access, and is licensed under Apache License, Version 2.0. The project describes use from weekend projects to global enterprises. Releases are not scheduled in advance, and versions below 9.10 are end of life without further updates. The Apache Solr plan is free.

Meilisearch is a search engine that can be added to websites and applications, with self-hosted and cloud deployment options. Full-text search includes automatic typo tolerance and relevance ranking; hybrid search combines keyword precision with semantic understanding. The product also provides retrieval infrastructure for RAG with hybrid retrieval and LangChain support, alongside faceted, federated, multimodal, personalized, and conversational search. Meilisearch supports more than 30 languages with automatic language detection and smart tokenization. Its SDKs, plugins, and integrations cover programming languages and frameworks including JavaScript, Python, PHP, Ruby, Go, Rust, Java,.NET, Swift, and Dart. The company says results return in under 50 milliseconds for typical workloads. Self-hosting costs nothing under the MIT license, but users manage infrastructure, updates, backups, and scaling. Cloud starts at $20 a month, with a 14-day free trial, usage- or resource-based billing, and email support. Enterprise pricing is custom and includes dedicated resources and Slack support. Meilisearch says its security measures include encryption, monitoring, assessments, and compliance measures including GDPR and SOC 2 Type 2.