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 powerful free open source search engine with a focus on low latency and high throughput full-text search and high volume stream filtering. It 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, faceting and other search-related technologies to their sites.
Key features:
- Fast real-time indexing and search
- Original document storage
- Scalability to hundreds of nodes
- Faceting
- Low disk and memory footprint
- Multi-language morphology support
- Native SQL support for easier query design
- HTTP JSON protocol for easier integration with your application
- Search-in-reverse for highly efficient text stream filtering
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
Wide range of Manticore and Sphinx search services
- Audit
- Support
- Consulting
- Development
- Training
Manticore vs 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 |
| Known crashes or major bugs not fixed (since 2018) | 3 | 20 |
| № of releases in 2019 | 9 | 0 |
| Latest release | 3.4.0 (March 26 2020) | 3.1.1 (17 Oct. 2018) |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| Limit ranking per fields | No | Yes |
| Security: https support | Yes | No |
| EXPLAIN QUERY | Yes | No |
| Community support and tools | ||
| Free config audit | Yes | No |
| Forum | Yes. Discourse | Yes |
| Public Slack | Yes | No |
| Bug tracker | Github | Mantis |
| Accepted pull requests on Github | 7 | 0 |
| Blogposts in 2018 | 49 | 3 |
| Active twitter account | Yes | No |
| Interactive courses | Yes | No |
| Integrations | ||
| SphinxSE | Yes | Yes |
| FEDERATED | Yes | No |
| ProxySQL | Yes | No |
| Yii2 Query Builder | Yes | Yes |
| Interfaces | ||
| SphinxQL | Yes | Yes |
| Binary API | Yes | Yes |
| HTTP protocol | REST API with Query DSL-like syntax, implements searching/reverse searching and CRUD operations | Basic, implements only searches |
| Binary API clients | ||
| PHP | official | official, but marked deprecated |
| Perl | official | official, but marked deprecated |
| Java | official | official, but marked deprecated |
| .NET | community | community |
| Ruby | official | official, but marked deprecated |
| Python | official | official, but marked deprecated |
| C++ | official | official, but marked deprecated |
| Go | official | No |
| Packaging | ||
| Linux | deb (all Ubuntu and Debian LTS) and rpm (RHEL/Centos 6 and 7) | generic tar.gz |
| Windows | zip | zip |
| macOS | zip | zip |
| FreeBSD | No | generic tar.gz |
| Docker | Yes, ubuntu based image | No official image, only binaries for Alpine |
| Source | Yes | No |
| Official YUM repo | Yes | No |
Community
Manticore Search has a strong community, its knowledge will help you with any questions.
Talk to us on
Slack
GitHub
Forum
Medium
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
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
- 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
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
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