AACSearch vs Meilisearch
Meilisearch is a fast open-source engine you run yourself. AACSearch is a hosted Search OS that adds merchandising, personalization and a quality lab on top.
Meilisearch earned its popularity by being genuinely easy to run and fast out of the box, with sensible typo tolerance defaults and a clean API — a great choice for a small-to-medium project that's comfortable operating its own search infrastructure. AACSearch targets a similar developer experience on the retrieval side, but as a hosted service with a merchandising, personalization and quality layer most teams would otherwise have to build from scratch.
Self-hosting vs hosted
Meilisearch is typically self-hosted (or used through Meilisearch Cloud); you're responsible for provisioning, backups, and scaling as your catalogue and traffic grow. AACSearch is hosted entirely — there's no server to provision, size, or patch.
Feature surface
Meilisearch's core strength is fast, simple full-text search with good defaults. It doesn't include built-in merchandising rules, personalization, recommendations, or an offline relevance evaluation framework — teams that need those typically build them alongside Meilisearch themselves. AACSearch includes all of them as part of the platform.
Multi-tenancy and billing
If you're building a product that serves many customers' storefronts (rather than a single catalogue), AACSearch's per-organization tenant isolation, scoped API keys, and usage-based billing are built in. Meilisearch's tenant tokens provide scoped, filtered API keys per tenant, but billing and quota enforcement across tenants is left to you.
| Feature | AACSearch | Meilisearch |
|---|---|---|
| Typo-tolerant full-text search | Yes | Yes |
| Vector & hybrid search | Yes | Yes (experimental) |
| Hosted / no infrastructure to run | Yes | Self-hosted or Meilisearch Cloud |
| Merchandising rules | Built in | Build it yourself |
| Personalization & recommendations | Built in | Build it yourself |
| Relevance evaluation (nDCG/MRR/MAP) | Built in | Build it yourself |
| Multi-tenant billing & quotas | Built in | Build it yourself |
| AI assistant with citations | Built in | Build it yourself |
| Open source | No — hosted platform with a vendor-neutral API | Yes |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Meilisearch faster than AACSearch?
Raw indexing and query latency depend on the underlying engine and your infrastructure choices more than on the product layer — AACSearch's retrieval layer is designed for the same low-latency use case Meilisearch targets.
Why would I pay for a hosted platform instead of self-hosting Meilisearch for free?
The engine itself being free doesn't include the operational cost of running it, or the engineering cost of building merchandising, personalization, and quality tooling around it. AACSearch is a reasonable trade when that combined cost exceeds a hosted plan's price.
Can I migrate from Meilisearch to AACSearch?
Yes — re-index your documents through AACSearch's import API or CSV/JSONL upload, and adjust query calls to AACSearch's search parameters. Most catalogues migrate in a day or two.