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
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 |
| Public issues (since 2019) | Total - 279, Actual - 72, Fixed - 207 | Total - 40, Actual- 40, Fixed - 0 |
| Releases in 2020 | 12 | 1 |
| Latest release | 3.5.4 (December 11, 2020) | 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
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