Tool profile
Search engine for fast, typo tolerant site and app search with simple APIs, relevant ranking, and quick setup.
Product search for SMB SaaS corpora
Meilisearch offers typo-tolerant full-text search with faceting, sorting, and growing AI/hybrid search marketing on cloud plans.
meilisearch.com/pricing (March 2026) advertises Cloud usage-based plans starting at $30/month with a 14-day free trial, managed infrastructure, preset document/search limits, and upgrade paths as usage grows. Cloud resource-based plans start at $23/month, billing by CPU, RAM, and storage with real-time infra metrics—positioned for high-traffic or vector workloads. Enterprise is custom with compliance and premier support options. Open source self-host remains free with community support.
Overages on usage-based plans bill per vendor rate card; switching between usage-based and resource-based may require support contact per FAQ.
Quick fit
Editorial take
Meilisearch is appealing because it gives you a genuine open-source fallback and a simpler hosted story than Elasticsearch, but the buying decision still comes down to whether your workload is better expressed as usage or as reserved resources.
What it does well
Primary use cases
Fit notes
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Pricing snapshot
Meilisearch's public pricing page offers two managed cloud paths plus open source. Usage-based cloud starts at $30 per month with a 14-day free trial, while resource-based cloud starts at $23 per month. Enterprise is custom, and the self-hosted open-source product remains free apart from your own infrastructure.
Alation
PaidEnterprise data catalog
Enterprise data intelligence and catalog platform for search, governance, trust, and AI-ready knowledge layers over organizational data.
Choose Alation when the buying problem is enterprise trust, governance, and discoverability across data assets.
