Typesense vs Meilisearch vs Algolia

Typesense, Meilisearch, Algolia side by side: price, free tier, who each one fits and when to skip it.

Item	Typesense	Meilisearch	Algolia
What it does	Open-source, in-memory search engine with typo tolerance, vector search and a managed Typesense Cloud.	Open-source search engine with typo tolerance and filters, which you can self-host or run on Meilisearch Cloud.	Hosted search API with instant results, typo tolerance and ready-made UI components for web and mobile.
Best for	SaaS with a big catalog that wants to pay for server size rather than per search, so a traffic spike doesn't blow up the bill.	Founder who wants Algolia-style search for free on their own VPS, and can upgrade to the managed cloud later.	SaaS or marketplace that wants polished search live in a day, with InstantSearch widgets and no server to run.
Skip it if	You want a permanent free tier: the Cloud freebie is a one-time 720 hours, then the cluster is billed in dollars.	You have no one to handle updates and backups and won't pay at least $20/month in dollars for the managed version.	Your search volume is about to grow fast, since every 1,000 searches past the free 10K a month is billed at $0.50.
Setup	Needs a developer. A day for the first version on Cloud; a day or two more to run your own server with backups.	Needs a developer. A day for the first version on Cloud; add a day or two to set up your own server with backups.	Needs a developer. A day for a polished first version with InstantSearch; longer if your data changes often and needs syncing.
Price	Not public on the page; priced by cluster size in the calculator	Cloud from $20/month	Pay as you go: $0.50 per 1K searches over 10K/month
What it costs in practice	Estimate: a month has about 730 hours, so the one-time 720 free hours cover roughly your first month on an eligible cluster. After that you pay the cluster's hourly fee all month (see the calculator; it isn't published on the page) plus bandwidth at about 9 to 12 cents per GB. 30K searches a month returning about 10 KB each is 0.3 GB, a few cents.	Estimate: 1,000 users × 30 searches a month = 30K searches, with 5K products. That fits the usage-based Cloud example of $30/month (100K documents, 50K searches). A resource-based XS instance (0.5 vCPU, 1 GB RAM) plus 32 GiB of disk is about $23/month. Self-hosted, the software is free and you pay only your server.	Estimate: 1,000 users × 30 searches a month × 5 keystrokes per search = 150K search requests, with 5K products. On Grow: (150K − 10K included) × $0.50 per 1K = $70/month; records stay inside the 100K included. If you search only on Enter, it's 30K requests: about $10/month.
Free plan	One-time 720 cluster hours and 10GB of bandwidth on Cloud; self-hosting is free.	14-day Cloud trial; the Community Edition is free to self-host under the MIT license.	Free plan: 10K search requests/month and 50K records.
Free tier	720 hours + 10GB once; free if self-hosted	14-day trial; free if self-hosted	10K searches/month, 50K records
First paid plan	Not public (per-cluster calculator)	Cloud from $20/month	Grow: $0.50/1K searches, $0.40/1K records
Self-host	Yes, open source	Yes, Community Edition (MIT)	No, cloud only
Open source	Yes: yes	Yes: yes	No: no
Before you build	The Cloud free tier is 720 hours and 10 GB of bandwidth once for the lifetime of the account, only on some configurations. It doesn't renew; after that, running clusters start billing. The hourly cluster fee is charged whether or not the cluster gets traffic, because the hardware is dedicated. A forgotten test cluster keeps billing. The whole index lives in RAM: plan 2 to 3 times the size of your searchable fields, plus 7 bytes per dimension per record for vectors. More data means a bigger, pricier cluster. The server is GPL-3.0. Running it as a separate service is fine, but if you distribute a modified version you must share the changes.	Not everything is MIT. Sharding, S3-streaming snapshots and search rule previews are in the Enterprise Edition, which isn't allowed in production without a commercial agreement. When self-hosting, the database only works with the version that created it. Updating usually works in place, but sometimes it fails at launch and you need to export a dump and re-import. On Cloud, version updates aren't automatic: you click the update button in the project settings yourself. The free option is only the 14-day Cloud trial or self-hosting. There's no permanent free cloud plan; Cloud starts at $20 a month in dollars.	With search-as-you-type, every keystroke is a search request. One user typing "sneakers" can count as several searches. When the free plan hits 10K searches or 50K records, Algolia may suspend the search or add its attribution to your results until you pick a paid plan. On the free plan, if the account stays inactive for more than 30 days, Algolia may delete your data. A paused prototype can come back empty. The free plan caps each record at 10 KB and the index at 1 GB. Long articles or product pages may need to be split into several records, which count toward your quota. Pick the plan carefully: Grow Plus charges $1.75 per 1K extra searches, 3.5 times Grow's $0.50, so moving up for its extra features multiplies the search bill.
Price checked	Price not public · official pricing	Checked on Oct 28, 2026 · official pricing	Checked on Oct 28, 2026 · official pricing

Prices are read from each official pricing page on the date shown and can change. Always confirm before signing up.

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