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StackGrep Engine vs Algolia

Algolia is hosted, typo-tolerant instant search for website and app search boxes, with merchandising and analytics. It doesn't offer regex queries. StackGrep Engine is something else: exact text and regex search over your own documents, built for AI agents, with every match counted and your index kept in object storage.

Join the waitlist See the engine

What StackGrep does differently

  • Regex search, which Algolia doesn't offer: exact text and patterns across whole documents, not typo-tolerant prefix matching on short records
  • Large documents (up to 2 MB of text each), not small records
  • Exact counts of every match
  • Built for agents: MCP tools and plain REST, no front-end widgets

When Algolia is the better pick

If you're building a search box for shoppers or readers, where typo tolerance, ranking rules and instant results as people type matter most.

Three calls to try it

POST /api/collections/docs/docs     {"docs": [{"id": "a1", "text": "...", "meta": {"team": "ops"}}]}
GET  /api/collections/docs/search?q=net+30&filter=team:ops
GET  /api/collections/docs/count?q=net+30

Quickstart →

Questions

Can StackGrep power my site's search box?

It's not built for that. It has no typo tolerance or as-you-type ranking. It's built for programs and agents that know what text they're looking for.

Is it cheaper than Algolia?

It's priced on what you store and search, not on records, and idle collections cost storage only. Which is cheaper depends on your data; we're happy to price yours.

Other comparisons

Elasticsearch alternativeTypesense alternativeMeilisearch alternativeturbopuffer alternativePinecone alternative

Use cases

Hosted grep for your AI agentsExact counts for RAG and agentsExact match search for AI agentsRAG without embeddingsGrep an S3 bucket: search the contents of every fileA regex search API that doesn't scan everythingA knowledge base MCP server for your documentsFind every contract that says exactly this

Give your agents exact search

StackGrep Engine is onboarding teams from the waitlist. Bring your documents or your bucket.

Join the waitlist Read the docs