Search engines for apps and sites in 2026
3 commercial products, ranked by how many people read about each, or about its maker, on Wikipedia's mobile site. Of those with an article of their own, Algolia has the most readers, about 194 a month. 30 open-source projects, ranked by GitHub stars and how recently each was worked on. Typesense leads with 27k stars, ahead of Sonic. 27 had code pushed in the last three months. Most common licenses: Apache-2.0 (14), MIT (5) and GPL-3.0 (3).
Commercial search engines for apps and sites
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1
Algolia Algolia
18,000+ organizations trust Algolia to build intuitive, adaptive, high-performing experiences with a unified AI search & retrieval platform spanning agentic, generative, and search.
Building block Production-ready An ecommerce or content site needs fast, polished search quickly and can pay for it.
194 readers a month Commercial -
2
Coveo Coveo
Generative search & relevant recommendations. The leading platform for GenAI, AI agents, commerce, customer service, workplace & website experiences.
Complete system Production-ready A large company needs relevance-tuned search across commerce or support content, often inside Salesforce or Sitecore.
132 readers a month Commercial -
3
Elastic Cloud Elastic NV
Elastic Cloud is a family of Elasticsearch SaaS offerings — including hosted Elasticsearch, hosted app search, and hosted site search — that make it easy to deploy, operate, and scale Elastic products...
Building block Production-ready You need Elasticsearch for search or logs and would rather pay Elastic than run clusters yourself.
Commercial
New open-source projects
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1
Kensaku yjid
Search inside documents, code, and even screenshots - instantly and locally. A free, open-source file launcher with OCR, semantic search, and MCP agent access.
Complete system Experimental You want fast local search inside files and images on your computer without sending data anywhere.
★ 589 MIT Rust Active, pushed today -
2
KiviDB kividbio
A fast, multi-threaded Redis® and Valkey alternative written in Rust: drop-in compatible, with full-text and vector search built in
Building block Experimental You want to experiment with a faster drop-in for Redis on many-core servers.
★ 1.1k AGPL-3.0 Rust Active, pushed today -
3
WinShun LingCore
Win顺：免费开源的 Windows 快速搜索启动器。双击 Ctrl，拼音秒搜文件、全文搜索 Word/Excel/PDF、剪贴板历史（代替 Win+V）、对话框搜索、任务栏搜索、插件、AI 助手 MCP。Free Windows search launcher: pinyin file search, full-text search, clipboard history, MCP server. Everything/Listary alternative.
Complete system Experimental You use Windows, often search in Chinese, and want an Everything or Listary alternative.
★ 826 MIT C++ Active, pushed today -
4
Zvec-grep zvec-ai
Local-first search across your workspace, built for humans and AI agents.
Developer tool Experimental You or your coding agent need to find things in a large workspace when you do not know the exact words.
★ 4.2k Apache-2.0 Rust Active, pushed today
Open-source search engines for apps and sites
Building blocks for your own system 9
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1
Typesense typesense
Open Source alternative to Algolia + Pinecone and an Easier-to-Use alternative to ElasticSearch ⚡ 🔍 ✨ Fast, typo tolerant, in-memory fuzzy Search Engine for building delightful search experiences
Building block Production-ready You want Algolia-style instant search for a site or app that you can self-host cheaply.
★ 27k GPL-3.0 C++ Active, pushed 3 days ago -
2
Sonic valeriansaliou
🦔 Fast, lightweight & schema-less search backend. An alternative to Elasticsearch that runs on a few MBs of RAM.
Building block Usable You need fast autocomplete and text search on a small server and can store documents elsewhere.
★ 21k MPL-2.0 Rust Active, pushed 3 days ago -
3
OpenSearch opensearch-project
🔎 Open source distributed and RESTful search engine.
Building block Production-ready You need Elasticsearch-class search under the Apache licence or run on AWS's managed OpenSearch.
★ 14k Apache-2.0 Java Active, pushed today -
4
Manticoresearch manticoresoftware
Open-source search database for full-text, vector, and hybrid search with real-time indexing and SQL.
Building block Production-ready You want a lighter Elasticsearch alternative and like querying search with SQL.
★ 12k GPL-3.0 C++ Active, pushed today -
5
Quickwit quickwit-oss
Cloud-native OSS search engine for observability
Building block Usable You need cheap, large-scale log search and want to move off Elasticsearch.
★ 12k Apache-2.0 Rust Active, pushed today -
6
ParadeDB paradedb
One Postgres for your application data, full-text search, vector retrieval, and aggregations. Home of the pg_search extension.
Building block Usable You want Elasticsearch-quality search on data already in Postgres without running a separate search cluster.
★ 9.5k AGPL-3.0 Rust Active, pushed today -
7
Infinity infiniflow
The AI-native database built for LLM applications, providing incredibly fast hybrid search of dense vector, sparse vector, tensor (multi-vector), and full-text.
Building block Experimental You need hybrid retrieval with tensor reranking for RAG and want it in a single engine.
★ 4.8k Apache-2.0 C++ Active, pushed today -
8
USearch unum-cloud
Fast Open-Source Search & Clustering engine × for Vectors & Arbitrary Objects × in C++, C, Python, JavaScript, Rust, Java, Objective-C, Swift, C#, GoLang, and Wolfram 🔍
Building block Production-ready You want to embed fast vector search into an application or database rather than run a vector database server.
★ 4.4k Apache-2.0 C++ Active, pushed 2 days ago -
9
Pg_textsearch timescale
PostgreSQL extension for BM25 relevance-ranked full-text search. Postgres OSS licensed.
Building block Usable You want better-ranked keyword search inside Postgres without a separate search engine, under a permissive license.
★ 4.1k PostgreSQL C Active, pushed today
Developer tools 1
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1
Zvec-grep zvec-ai
Local-first search across your workspace, built for humans and AI agents.
Developer tool Experimental You or your coding agent need to find things in a large workspace when you do not know the exact words.
★ 4.2k Apache-2.0 Rust Active, pushed today
Compared head to head
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Open-source licenses
- Permissive: 20. Use it anywhere, including in closed products. You keep the copyright notice; Apache-2.0 also grants patent rights.
- Strong copyleft: 3. If you distribute the program or anything built on it, you must release the whole source under the same license.
- Network copyleft: 3. Like GPL, and running a changed version as a web service counts as distributing it, so its users get the source too.
- Weak copyleft: 2. Changes to the licensed files must be shared, but you can link them into a closed program.
- Public domain: 2. No conditions at all. You can copy, change and sell the code without even keeping the notice.
Languages
Rust 9, C++ 6, Python 5, Java 2, C 2, Go 2, JavaScript 1, PHP 1, TypeScript 1 and Svelte 1.
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