I'd say that the bit where typesense can only work with data that fits in ram is actually a pretty big problem for a lot of use cases, as an aside. That feature alone would discount typesense for basically all of my personal projects. Might be a trade off I'd be willing to make on a professional project given the other features but it seems really wasteful.
Of course I'm not a large enterprise e-commerce site. I'm doing personal projects like web archiving, (dataset probably won't be anywhere near fitting in ram) or I'm using search engines on embedded devices (search needs to play well with others, not use all my ram).
There's a big difference between recommended and required. Of course things work better if your entire dataset fits in ram, and of course at the giant enterprise scale you can do that, but it's not something I'm going to do on my VPS along side wordpress, you know? I don't really care about getting maximum possible performance when the data is only going to be accessed intermittently. I care about letting the OS maximize performance by choosing what gets cached in ram.
Typesense follows a memory model similar to Redis - you need sufficient RAM to hold the entire dataset.
I don't want to speak for the Meilisearch team, but from observing user reports like this [1], it seems to me like you'd need at least X-2X RAM to run Meilisearch, if X is the size of your dataset, if you want it to not slow down as it swaps content from Disk to RAM.
I mean that user report is from me, and was about a very very early meilisearch version. Maybe wrong link?
> if you want it to not slow down as it swaps content from Disk to RAM.
Obviously it's going to be fastest to run with your entire dataset in RAM, that's never in doubt. Part of why I find the whole typesense comparison page disingenuous is that you're making the ability to swap to disk sound like an anti-feature. The whole things just sounds biased in a way that the meilisearch comparison doesn't.
There are some killer features in typesense for sure, just my first impression of it is that it's very much aimed at someone other than me.
>Typesense follows a memory model similar to Redis
The difference is that redis is primarily being used as a cache, or for IPC, or as a task-queue. You're not loading a whole bunch of data into, and you expect that the data you have in it will either be short-lived (IPC, queue) or can be evicted with no issues (caching).
>May I know which part of the comparison table makes it sound like that?
Well a few things. Normally I'd try to coach these a bit kinder and all that, but I hope you don't mind if I just come out and talk about the issues. Keep in mind that these are just my interpretations after a quick read through.
# Bias
> Instant Search-as-you-type Experiences for up to a few hundred thousand records, that don't require a production-grade highly-available setup.
Seeing as meilisearch is your biggest competitor saying that they're not "production grade" sounds biased. "Production grade" is subjective, and I understand why it's written that way you define production grade to include high-availability multi-node configurations. I don't necessarily disagree but I think you need to drop "production grade" from that sentence and just say "high availability". Maybe add a row to your overview talking about high availability since it seems to be one of the factors you consider to be a significant differentiator.
>Only supports a single-node setup, which creates a potential single point of failure and so is not production-ready, despite the v1.x versioning.
This here is another spot where you seem biased. Remove the "despite v1.x versioning", it comes off as petty. I'd also remove the part where you say "is not production ready". You seem to have a very concrete idea of what production looks like, but for me one example of production looks like a raspberry pi in a school house in rural africa (internet in a box project). Under those constraints typesense isn't production ready.
I get what you're saying about "production ready" but there must be another way to word it?
The whole "production ready" line of reasoning comes off as arrogant and petty in general.
>Runtime Dependencies [...] Recommends use of nginx, apache or the like as a reverse proxy in front
Meilisearch is also a single self-contained binary with an embedded http server. I don't think either of you support https. Do you really not recommend the use of a reverse proxy? How do you route subdomains? I guess you're assuming it's running on a stand alone computer with a public facing IP and no SSL? Are you not providing a frontend/dashboard? You've made this sound like a draw back, if you had of put "None. Self-contained binary" in front of it like you did for yourself that would be fine but for this you mention a feature that you have while ignoring what looks to me like the same feature in your competitor.
>Language support
This is also a bit confusing, and I can't help but think it's probably not completely honest. What makes meilisearch different so that it doesn't support "all languages", but elasticsearch does? Meilisearch certainly claims to support all languages where words are seperated by spaces, do you support languages that don't have words separated by spaces?
This implication for this line seems to be that meilisearch isn't indexing on unicode, or something. Just weird, needs more detail probably.
This is completely fine! Good job linking to the pertinent issue and everything. This is how you mention significant drawbacks without seeming biased or petty.
# Target use case
This also seems to be pretty firmly aimed at large enterprise clients. If that's not the impression you're going for, well change the memory model but there's some language in this comparison that can probably help.
> CDN-like Geo-Distributed clusters
Just sounds buzz-wordy to me. Might be fine if I didn't get the impression for the previous paragraphs that my use cases weren't "production ready (webscale?)" and that I'm using it wrong if it's not on a server with 24 TB of ram.
This is more about who the intended customer is than about bias though, so I don't think it's really an issue. Your intended customer isn't some bloke running wordpress on a VPS, it's large scale enterprise and that's fine. If you want to soften that there's a few more things you'll need to change, but when combined with the above stuff about "production ready" it leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, like you'd really rather I be paying you exorbitant rates to run this in your cloud than just using it.
Hmmm, I remember those emails and I did reply to gmourier, and made almost all of the changes he pointed out, to our comparison page. Here's [1] the exact commit with the changes I made.
The only one change I didn't make is the one about Meilisearch not being constrained by RAM, because of reports like this [2] I've seen in the past and because I saw this in your docs:
>For the best performance, it is recommended to provide the same amount of RAM as the size the database takes on disk, so all the data structures can fit in memory.
But let me know which ones need updating for Meilisearch. Happy to update.
While we’re on the topic, reminder about some of the outdated information in your comparison pages: https://twitter.com/typesense/status/1620825236055932928?s=4...