Sonic
valeriansaliou/sonic
An open-source alternative to Elasticsearch.
🦔 Fast, lightweight & schema-less search backend. An alternative to Elasticsearch that runs on a few MBs of RAM. (from the repository)
- Stars
- 21,364
- Licence
- MPL-2.0
- Last push
- 2026-10-15
- Written in
- Rust
Is it alive?
Four readings from the repository, each with the rule behind it. No blended score.
Activity
Active
Last push 13 days ago
Active: pushed within 90 days. Slowing: within a year. Quiet: longer.
Releases
Recent
v1.10.2, 23 days ago
Recent: a tagged release within six months. Some projects ship from the main branch and never tag.
Issues
83% closed
53 open · 254 closed
Share of all issues ever filed that are now closed. Under 20 issues is too few to read.
Momentum
+8 in 9 days
21,364 stars
Change in stars across our daily readings, over up to 30 days. Needs a week of readings.
What a business may do with it
Weak copyleftMPL-2.0
Usable inside a closed product. Changes to its own files must be shared under the same licence when you distribute them.
This describes the licence family GitHub identified, not legal advice about this project. The repository’s own LICENSE file is what binds you.
Run it yourself
Docker, quoted from Sonic’s own README as written. We have not run it, and most projects expect you to set secrets or a database before production use.
docker run -p 1491:1491 -v /path/to/your/sonic/config.cfg:/etc/sonic/config.toml -v /path/to/your/sonic/store/:/var/lib/sonic/store/ valeriansaliou/sonic:v1.4.9
Sonic against the other open-source options
Every project offered against Elasticsearch, most-starred first.
| Project | Stars | Activity | Licence | Self-host | Language |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Sonic (this page) | 21,364 | Active | Weak copyleft | Docker | Rust |
 Manticoresearch | 12,063 | Active | Copyleft | Docker | C++ |
 Quickwit | 11,725 | Active | Permissive | ○ | Rust |
 Matano | 1,700 | Quiet | Permissive | ○ | Rust |
Where this page comes from
- Stars, licence, activity, issues, releases and the self-host command are read from the repository. 2026-10-19
- The pairing with Elasticsearch and the category come from opensourcealternative.to, a community directory of open-source alternatives. We re-read it weekly.
- Star momentum comes from our own daily readings of the repository. How we collect data