Meilisearch is an open-source search engine that developers add to websites and apps for fast search-as-you-type. The company behind it is based in Paris, and Quentin de Quelen is its co-founder and...
Qdrant is an open-source vector database and vector search engine from Berlin. André Zayarni and Andrey Vasnetsov started the project in 2021, and Qdrant Solutions GmbH has since raised a Series B...
Vespa.ai is a search and AI serving platform from Trondheim, Norway. Its technology goes back to AllTheWeb, a Norwegian search engine that Yahoo acquired in 2003. Vespa was released as open source...
Weaviate is an open-source vector database from Weaviate B.V. in Amsterdam, led by co-founder and chief executive Bob van Luijt. It stores objects together with their vectors, so applications can combine semantic...
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Submit SuggestionEuropean alternatives to Algolia for site and app search include Meilisearch (France), Qdrant (Germany), Weaviate (Netherlands) and Vespa.ai (Norway). All four are open source and can be run on one's own servers or used as a managed service. Algolia was founded in Paris in 2012 by Nicolas Dessaigne and Julien Lemoine, but its company is headquartered in San Francisco, which is why it counts as a US provider here.
Algolia sells hosted search and retrieval for websites, shops and apps. According to its own figures it serves more than 18,000 brands and powers over 1.75 trillion searches a year, with more than 800 employees. Teams use it for search-as-you-type, relevance tuning and AI-based search without running servers themselves.
Algolia is a finished hosted service, so it comes with ready-made interfaces and relevance tools. The European products ask for more engineering work, especially when self-hosted, and the vector databases are better seen as building blocks than as drop-in site search. All four are compared in the search engine software category.