How Search Stack compares
Most tools sell you a search API to wire up. Search Stack makes your data searchable — for people and for AI agents — and tells you, as a number, whether it is any good.
Start on the free plan — every feature, no credit card.
Search quality, as a number
A judge scores the searches your users really make, and you track one pass rate. Swap a model or a reranker and see whether search got better or worse.
Agent-native & multimodal
Text, vector, hybrid, geo and grouping, plus image and video search and a built-in MCP server so AI agents can query your index directly.
Free to start
Versioned REST API, typed SDKs, drop-in components, a console for the whole team. The free plan holds 10,000 records, no card; flat tiers from $29/mo.
Feature comparison
| Capability | Search Stack | Algolia | Typesense / Meilisearch | Elastic / Azure AI Search |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Keyword, filter, facet & geo | ||||
| Vector / semantic & hybrid | ||||
| Image & video (multimodal) search | ||||
| Bring your own embedding keys | ||||
| Rerankers | ||||
| Autocomplete & typo tolerance | ||||
| Agent-native MCP server (read & write) | ||||
| Search-quality evals (tracked pass rate) | ||||
| Managed, fully hosted option | ||||
| Console for non-engineers | ||||
| Typed SDKs | ||||
| Pricing model | Free plan, no card then flat tiers from $29/mo no per-search metering |
Usage-metered (records + operations) |
Open-source, free to self-host; cheap managed cloud |
Infra-scale (per node / RAM-hour) |
built in partial / do-it-yourself not offered. Competitor capabilities and pricing models as of June 2026. Check each vendor's site for current details.
What it costs
- Free to 10,000 records — every feature, no card.
- Then flat tiers at $29, $99 and $299/mo. No per-search or per-record metering.
- Embeddings, rerankers and judges run on your own model keys, so AI spend is never marked up here.
See the full pricing and plan limits
Is Search Stack right for you?
A great fit if…
- You want modern search and AI/agent access, without running any of it yourself.
- You'd rather not build and maintain your own search gateway, embedding pipeline and console.
- You want flat, predictable pricing and a UI non-engineers can use.
- You need image, video and multimodal search alongside text.
Maybe look elsewhere if…
- You need deep, backend-specific tuning and want to wire every native feature yourself. Go direct to Elastic or Azure AI Search.
- You need to run the search engine yourself, or keep the index inside your own cloud. Search Stack is hosted — index, API and console are all run by us.
- You're a large enterprise after a fully managed merchandising/discovery suite. That's a different category.
We'd rather tell you straight than sell you the wrong thing.
Is anyone actually running on it?
Verdct — a film site with no database
Films fed live from TMDB, browsed by genre and year, searched as you type, and reviewed in prose rather than stars. Every filter, suggestion and verdict on the site is a Search Stack call — delete the two lists and there is nothing left to render.
See every feature, and the call behind it