Fess vs WinShun
Fess and WinShun are both search engine software. Fess is open source under Apache-2.0, with 1.1k GitHub stars. WinShun is open source under MIT, with 826 GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Fess when
- Your organisation wants one internal search across intranet sites and file shares without building on Elasticsearch directly.
- Pick WinShun when
- You use Windows, often search in Chinese, and want an Everything or Listary alternative.
Side by side
A self-hosted enterprise search server on OpenSearch that crawls websites, file shares, databases and cloud sources and provides a search UI, REST API and RAG answers.
A Windows search launcher opened by double-pressing Ctrl, with pinyin file search, full-text search of Office and PDF files, clipboard history, plugins and an MCP server.
A Java and OpenSearch stack to run, and the community is small and centred in Japan.
Created in October 2026 and mainly aimed at Chinese-speaking users.
Production-ready
Experimental
Self-hosted server
Desktop app
Java and OpenSearch
C++, QML and Python
Open source, Apache-2.0 (permissive)
Open source, MIT (permissive)
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice. (both)
1.1k GitHub stars
826 GitHub stars
Established: started 13 years ago, latest release fess-15.9.0.
New: started under a month ago, latest release v0.18.0.
Other comparisons
More search engines for apps and sites
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from each project's README and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.