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Meilisearch has one supported release line and Elasticsearch has 3. Meilisearch 1.53 reached end of life on Sep 21, 2026, and Elasticsearch 9.3 reached it on Aug 4, 2026. Meilisearch is open source (MIT); Elasticsearch offers SSPL-1.0, Elastic-2.0 or AGPL-3.0.
Last checked against endoflife.date, deps.dev and OSV.dev.
Every value links to its source. Where a row doesn’t apply to one of them, the cell says why.
| Compared on |  Meilisearch |  Elasticsearch |
|---|---|---|
| Support and releases | ||
| Supported release lines | ||
| Latest release | ||
| Releases in the last 12 months | ||
| Security | ||
| Advisories published in the last 12 months | Not tracked as a package on OSV.dev | |
| OpenSSF Scorecard | ||
| Licence and hosting | ||
| Licence | MIT Open source (permissive) That’s the Community Edition; Enterprise Edition features, such as sharding and replication, are under BUSL-1.1. | SSPL-1.0, Elastic-2.0 or AGPL-3.0 Open source under the AGPL-3.0 option Elastic left Apache 2.0 in 2021; the default distribution is under the Elastic License 2.0, which forbids offering Elasticsearch as a managed service. AGPLv3 was added as a source-code option in 2024. |
| How you run it | Self-hosted, or Meilisearch Cloud, the vendor’s managed service | Self-hosted, or Elastic Cloud, the vendor’s managed service |
| Adoption | ||
| GitHub stars | ||
| Meilisearch | Elasticsearch |
|---|---|
| Supported release lines | |
| Latest release | |
| Releases in the last 12 months | |
| Meilisearch | Elasticsearch |
|---|---|
| Advisories published in the last 12 months | |
Not tracked as a package on OSV.dev | |
| OpenSSF Scorecard | |
| Meilisearch | Elasticsearch |
|---|---|
| Licence | |
MIT Open source (permissive) That’s the Community Edition; Enterprise Edition features, such as sharding and replication, are under BUSL-1.1. | SSPL-1.0, Elastic-2.0 or AGPL-3.0 Open source under the AGPL-3.0 option Elastic left Apache 2.0 in 2021; the default distribution is under the Elastic License 2.0, which forbids offering Elasticsearch as a managed service. AGPLv3 was added as a source-code option in 2024. |
| How you run it | |
Self-hosted, or Meilisearch Cloud, the vendor’s managed service | Self-hosted, or Elastic Cloud, the vendor’s managed service |
| Meilisearch | Elasticsearch |
|---|---|
| GitHub stars | |
Read across for what matters to you. Each answer comes from the data above or the project’s licence and hosting options.
| If you need | Meilisearch | Elasticsearch |
|---|---|---|
| An open-source licence | Yes: MIT | Yes: Under the AGPL-3.0 option |
| Someone else runs it for you | Yes: From Meilisearch Cloud | Yes: From Elastic Cloud |
| You can run it on your own servers | Yes: Yes, it’s software you install | Yes: Yes, it’s software you install |
| A long support window | Only the newest line (1.54); no end dates published | 8.19 is supported until Jul 15, 2027 |
| Meilisearch | Elasticsearch |
|---|---|
| An open-source licence | |
Yes: MIT | Yes: Under the AGPL-3.0 option |
| Someone else runs it for you | |
Yes: From Meilisearch Cloud | Yes: From Elastic Cloud |
| You can run it on your own servers | |
Yes: Yes, it’s software you install | Yes: Yes, it’s software you install |
| A long support window | |
Only the newest line (1.54); no end dates published | 8.19 is supported until Jul 15, 2027 |
Lightning-fast open-source search engine
Distributed search and analytics engine
From StackPrism’s curated notes. Pricing isn’t covered here: it changes often, so check each vendor’s pricing page.
Meilisearch is built for instant, typo-tolerant search in websites and apps, with sensible defaults out of the box; Elasticsearch is a general search and analytics engine that also powers log analytics. Teams usually weigh how much tuning they want to do against how much the engine can do.
Release lines and end-of-life dates come from endoflife.date, release counts from deps.dev’s publish dates, and advisories from OSV.dev, counted once per flaw even when it’s listed under several ids, and checked against CISA’s list of vulnerabilities known to be exploited. Status and incident history come from each vendor’s public status feed; licences from each project’s licence file or the vendor’s licensing page, linked in the table.
The data refreshes every few hours and the time it was checked is shown above. There’s no pricing and no overall winner: which one fits depends on your constraints. To see how the versions you actually run hold up, check your repo.
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