It is never easy to start a blog, we never know what to say on the first blog post 😱 so I will keep it simple here.
We are Meili, a team of three developers. In our previous job we worked on building a search engine aiming for the best end-user experience.
The most common alternatives were Algolia or ElasticSearch. Where the first one is only available as a service, you hand over your data and could be expensive. The second one is overkill for a simple end-user search, complicated to setup and configure.
So here came our idea to develop an open source alternative to Algolia, easy to setup, lightweight and fast.
So...
...Welcome on our blog! 🎉
I expect we will use it as often as possible to talk about what we build, company news and various thoughts.
(I just hope I won't be the only reader of this blog 🤭)
Launch Week wrap-up: everything that shipped in five days, April 2026
Everything from Meilisearch Launch Week, in one place. Five days, every release, who it's for.
Conversational search, out of the box: Meilisearch Chat in Cloud UI
Meilisearch Cloud now ships a built-in chat UI. Select an index, get an auto-generated system prompt, guardrails, and an inspector tab to debug - no separate AI pipeline required.
Scale without limits: introducing sharding & replication in Meilisearch Cloud
Meilisearch Cloud now supports sharding and replication - letting your search infrastructure scale horizontally, stay available during updates, and serve users from the nearest node. Here is what that means and who it is for.