Meilisearch vs Algolia
Algolia charges metered per search and per record. Meilisearch is open source and self-hosted.
The short answer
Meilisearch gives you typo-tolerant instant search you host yourself, so a traffic spike costs RAM instead of a bill. Algolia wins on scale, global latency and the surrounding tooling.
Pick Meilisearch when
- Your search bill scales with traffic and your revenue does not.
- Your corpus fits comfortably in memory on one machine.
- You want search behaviour you can tune without a vendor conversation.
Stay with Algolia when
- You need multi-region low latency without operating it.
- Your index is large enough that memory becomes the expensive part.
- You rely on the incumbent's analytics, A/B testing or merchandising tools.
The migration cost nobody mentions
Indexing is straightforward; relevance tuning is not. Budget real time to get ranking as good as what you already have, and A/B it before you cut over.
We deliberately do not quote Algolia's prices — third-party pricing changes without notice and a stale number is worse than none. The pricing model is what determines whether self-hosting wins, and that is stated above. Check current pricing with the vendor.