About Manticore Search

Language

Free open-source text search engine

Our story

Manticore Search was born in 2017 as a continuation of Sphinx Search (which started in 2001). We took the best from Sphinx (C++ core and focus on low level data structures and fine-tuned algorithms), added more functionality, fixed tons of bugs, made it easier to use, kept it open source and made Manticore Search even more lightweight & extremely fast full-text search engine.

What is Manticore?

Manticore Search is a free and open source database designed specifically for search, including full-text search. We focus on low latency and high throughput full-text search and high volume stream filtering. Manticore Search helps thousands of companies from small to large, such as Craigslist, to search and filter petabytes of text data on a single or hundreds of nodes, do stream full-text filtering, add auto-complete, spell correction, more-like-this, faceted search and other search-related technologies to their sites.

Manticore or Sphinx?

Here’s what makes Manticore different from Sphinx:

Hundreds of bugs fixed
Higher performance
Many major and minor features added: Percolate index, Replication, Highlight, new index format, new index access modes, HTTP JSON interface, easier morphology, OR in WHERE, HTTPS support, MySQL’s FEDERATED and ProxySQL support and many others
Better documentation and interactive courses
Premium service and support

Please find the complete comparison here

Key features:

Powerful and fast full-text searching which works fine for small and big datasets
SQL-first: the native Manticore’s syntax is SQL. It speaks SQL over HTTP and MySQL protocol (you can use your preferred mysql client)
JSON over HTTP: to provide more programmatic way to manage your data and schemas Manticore provides HTTP JSON protocol. Very similar to the one from Elasticsearch
Written fully in C++: starts fast, doesn’t take much RAM, low-level optimizations give good performance
Real-time inserts: after INSERT is made the document can be read immediately
Interactive courses for easier learning
Built-in replication and load balancing
Can sync from MySQL/PostgreSQL/ODBC/xml/csv out of the box
Not fully ACID-compliant, but supports transactions and binlog for safe writes

Features in details

Built-in SQL

The easiest and most intuitive way for designing queries which lets you learn the technology very fast

Rich search query syntax

Use lots of search operators and expressions to let your users find what they really need

Document storage

Stores your original documents on disk compressed with no memory footprint and low-latency access

Replication

Synchronous replication for Real-time and PQ indexes

Real-time indexes

RT indexes allows updates be instant available for searching

Faceted search

Built-in FACET operator lets you implement faceted search with just few lines of code

Geosearch locating

Find objects close to others easily with built-in radius/polygon search functions

Powerful search ranking algorithm

Customize search ranking formula to promote things that really matter to your business

Built-in JSON support

If you prefer JSON based DSL over HTTP, Manticore supports it

Percolate Queries

Incredibly efficient, high-throughput stream filtering and high-quality filtering capabilities

Flexible custom morphology

When you need you can customize morphology on a character-by-character level

Built-in MySQL, Postgres and CSV support

Manticore Search can easily index from MySQL/Postgres/CSV/TSV out of the box. Just a matter of few lines in the config file

ODBC and XMLpipe drivers for any data storage

Want to index data from other data storages? If it supports ODBC – not a problem at all. Xmlpipe driver covers everything else.

Built-in morphology support for most languages

In most cases, you don’t need to think about search morphology at all

Works on any OS and in clouds

Works in Linux, Windows, OSX and in Docker

Wide range of built-in functions

Tens of built-in functions and operators allow to do not only search but analytic requests. We also support user-defined functions for any custom needs you may have

Wide range of Manticore and Sphinx search services

Manticore vs Sphinx

Github commit stats before and after we forked from Sphinx.


General
Open source	Yes	No, only old version is opensource
License	GPLv2	Delayed FOSS, Commercial
Performance	Up to 2x higher	Lower
Stability	Higher (based on what Manticore users say when migrating from Sphinx 2/3)	Lower
Public issues (since 2019)	Total - 279, Actual - 72, Fixed - 207	Total - 40, Actual- 40, Fixed - 0
Releases in 2020	12	1
Latest release	3.6.0 (May 3, 2021)	3.3.1 (July 6, 2020)

Features
Multi-threaded Real-time indexes	Yes	No
Indexing sources	MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL, XML , CSV/TSV, any DB supporting ODBC	MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL, XML , CSV/TSV, any DB supporting ODBC
Index types	Plain, RealTime, template, distributed, percolate	Plain,RealTime, template, distributed
Built-in high-availability	Yes	Yes
Percolate Queries (reverse search)	Yes	No
Index Replication	Yes	No
Built-in Linguistic collections	Lemmatizers for 3 languages, stopwords for 50 languages. Chinese ICU processor. No need to maintain in most cases long charset_table. Snowball 2.0 with 25 stemmers	Lemmatizers for 3 languages. Need to maintain long charset_table. Snowball 1.0 with 15 stemmers
Multi-tasking	Coroutines	Threads
Docstore	Yes	Yes
Secondary index	No	Yes
OR in WHERE	Yes	No
More string functions	Yes	No
Index converter	Yes	No
True seamless rotation	Yes	No
Smart rotation	Yes	No
Security: https support	Yes	No
EXPLAIN QUERY	Yes	No

Community support and tools
Free config audit	Yes	No
Forum	Yes	Yes
Public Slack	Yes	No
Bug tracker	Github	Mantis
Accepted pull requests on Github	12	0
Blogposts in 2020	37	1
Interactive courses	Yes	No

Integrations
SphinxSE	Yes	Yes
FEDERATED	Yes	No
ProxySQL	Yes	No

Interfaces
SphinxQL	Yes	Yes
Binary API	Yes	Yes
HTTP protocol	Yes	Basic, implements only searches

Сlients
PHP	Official	Official, but marked deprecated
Perl	Unofficial	Official, but marked deprecated
.NET	3rd party	Сommunity
Ruby	Official	Official, but marked deprecated
Python	Official	Official, but marked deprecated
C++	Official	Official, but marked deprecated
Go	Official	No
Java	Official	Official, but marked as work in progress
Javascript	Official	No
Elixir	Official	Unofficial

Packaging
Linux	deb (all Ubuntu and Debian LTS) and rpm (RHEL/Centos 6, 7 and 8) packages	generic tar.gz
Windows	zip	zip
macOS	zip	zip
FreeBSD	No	generic tar.gz
Docker	Yes	No official image, only binaries for Alpine
Source	Yes	No
Official YUM repo	Yes	No
Official APT repo	Yes	No
Homebrew Formulae	Yes	No

Community

Manticore Search has a strong community, its knowledge will help you with any questions.

Talk to us on

Interactive courses

We have great Interactive Courses that can help you easily learn Manticore Search starting from how to install and configure it to Geo Search, Did you mean, Autocomplete and Faceting implementation.

Downloads

Operation Systems

Debian

Ubuntu

RHEL\CentOS

Windows

MacOS

Docker

Packages

YUM repo for RedHat and CentOS

HomeBrew for MacOS

Companies that trust us

To improve the relevance of our customers’ results we use Manticore Search as our data indexing solution, and Manticore Percolate Queries for real-time filtering of data in transit. read more

JAY KRALL

VP Product, SocialGist
We’ve chosen this product because of the high performance compared to alternatives, the ability to expand the functionality with help of udf-functions and the availability of SQL-like query language. read more

IVAN IVANOV

Team leader, OWOX
We contacted Manticore’s free support on Slack with questions related to migrating form Sphinx search.
In 30 minutes we had the first reply, and a few days later our issue was resolved, and we now using Manticore search to perform over 5 billion queries every day. read more

ALEXANDER SØRNES

Senior Developer, JMT Nordic
We opted to migrate to Manticore instead of upgrading Sphinx since Manticore is open source and better supported. We’re very happy with our decision. read more

JOSH MAINES

Buds Gun Shop
We were using Sphinx but lately was crashing quite often and as a result making our homepage completely broken … We now only have some quick performance drops, instead of a continuous failure read more

TRANG HO & GILLES BEDEL