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European Search Engine & Vector Database Software

Meilisearch Logo

Meilisearch

France
EU
Open Source
Self-Hostable

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...

Website
Qdrant Logo

Qdrant

Germany
EU
Open Source
Self-Hostable

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...

Website
Vespa.ai Logo

Vespa.ai

Norway
Open Source
Self-Hostable

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...

Website
Weaviate Logo

Weaviate

Netherlands
EU
Open Source
Self-Hostable

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...

Website

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Search engine software lets developers build search into their own websites, shops and apps. It indexes the company's content, ranks results and answers queries in milliseconds. Vector databases extend this with search by meaning: texts, images and other data are turned into vectors, and similar items are found even without matching keywords. The products on this page are Meilisearch (France), Qdrant (Germany), Weaviate (Netherlands) and Vespa.ai (Norway). They are open-source alternatives to hosted search services such as Algolia. Web search engines for end users are listed under search engines.

Search and vector database software compared

ProductHeadquartersLicenceFocus
MeilisearchParis, FranceMIT (community edition), enterprise edition under commercial termsSite and app search with typo tolerance, facets and hybrid search
QdrantBerlin, GermanyApache 2.0Vector database with payload filtering, hybrid search and quantization
WeaviateAmsterdam, NetherlandsBSD 3-Clause, enterprise functions under a commercial licenceVector database with hybrid search, built-in generative search and multi-tenancy
Vespa.aiTrondheim, NorwayOpen source (Apache 2.0)Platform for text, vectors and tensors in one query, for large-scale search and recommendation

Which product for which need

  • A search box for a website or shop: Meilisearch is built for search-as-you-type with typo tolerance and facets.
  • Similarity search for AI applications: Qdrant and Weaviate store vectors and combine them with filters and keyword search.
  • Large or mixed workloads: Vespa runs search, vector search and model inference in one platform and is built for high volumes, with a steeper learning curve.

What to check before choosing

  • Operating effort: Self-hosting needs servers and updates. Meilisearch, Qdrant, Weaviate and Vespa each also offer a managed cloud service.
  • Licence: Enterprise functions at Meilisearch and Weaviate are under commercial terms, so check which functions are needed.
  • Data location: With a cloud offering, find out which region processes the data.

What Europe does not offer

Large hosted search platforms with many ready-made merchandising and analytics tools mostly come from the US. The products here ask for more engineering work than a finished service. Several of them are young, venture-funded companies, so ownership and licence terms can change over time.