Elasticsearch vs Meilisearch

#elasticsearch #php #laravel #hiring

During the process of building arbeitnow there was a need for providing a near instant search experience for Job Seekers.

Criteria:

Easy to integrate with PHP
Runs reasonably well on VPS systems
Good community support (GitHub or Stackoverflow)
Flexibility

I had a bit of experience on Elasticsearch with a small project, which I learnt with the help of Udemy tutorials which were great. It should have been the obvious choice, except for the fact that it does require a steep learning curve and setup to get it going smoothly.

So I decided to give Meilisearch a try. It's quick, small footprint, integrates well using their SDK and provides great tolerance for typo's. But unfortunately, it lacks a lot when it comes to customising Search filters.

Things missing from Meilisearch:

Setting up Synonyms from a file
Multiple WHERE clauses, thus limiting search to simple queries and restricts us to mostly single columns WHERE conditions
Multi Index searching
Sorting Results

Elasticsearch supports all of the above (their recent licensing change is another thing!) so I decided to go with it.

Meilisearch's public roadmap is indeed promising, so I will surely be coming back to it in the near future, it is a great tool for smaller projects and hopefully it gets the love it deserves!