Typesense — Self-Hosted, Open-Source
Blazing fast, typo-tolerant open source search engine optimized for developer happiness and ease of use.
License: GPL-3.0. Website: https://typesense.org. Source: https://github.com/typesense/typesense.
Features
- Typo Tolerance: Handles typographical errors elegantly, out-of-the-box.
- Simple and Delightful: Simple to set-up, integrate with, operate and scale.
- ⚡ Blazing Fast: Built in C++. Meticulously architected from the ground-up for low-latency (<50ms) instant searches.
- Tunable Ranking: Easy to tailor your search results to perfection.
- Sorting: Dynamically sort results based on a particular field at query time (helpful for features like "Sort by Price (asc)").
- Faceting & Filtering: Drill down and refine results.
- Grouping & Distinct: Group similar results together to show more variety.
- Federated Search: Search across multiple collections (indices) in a single HTTP request.
- Geo Search: Search and sort by results around a latitude/longitude or within a bounding box.
- Vector Search: Index embeddings from your machine learning models in Typesense and do a nearest-neighbor search. Can be used to build similarity search, semantic search, visual search, recommendations, etc.
Installation
docker run -p 8108:8108 -v/tmp/data:/data typesense/typesense:29.0 --data-dir /data --api-key=Hu52dwsas2AdxdE
Why self-host Typesense
Self-hosting gives you three things SaaS can’t: data ownership (the files live on disks you control), cost predictability (a one-time setup vs. recurring per-seat fees that grow with your household or team), and longevity (open-source means the app keeps working even if the maintainers move on, since you can pin a working version). The trade-off is that you take on the operational work of running a server, applying updates, and handling backups.
Hardware notes
Took up about 900MB of RAM when indexed in Typesense Took up about 14GB of RAM when indexed in Typesense A fresh Typesense server will consume about 30 MB of memory. As you start indexing documents, the memory use will
Last verified: 2026-04-28