
❗Note: If your use case is of log search (app and security logs) instead of app search (implement search feature in your application or website) then you should check zinclabs/zincobserve project that is specifically built for observability use case.
ZincSearch
ZincSearch is a search engine that does full text indexing. It is a lightweight alternative to Elasticsearch and runs using a fraction of the resources. It uses bluge as the underlying indexing library.
It is very simple and easy to operate as opposed to Elasticsearch which requires a couple dozen knobs to understand and tune which you can get up and running in 2 minutes
It is a drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch if you are just ingesting data using APIs and searching using kibana (Kibana is not supported with zinc. Zinc provides its own UI).
Check the below video for a quick demo of Zinc.

Playground Server
You could try ZincSearch without installing using below details:
Note: Do not store sensitive data on this server as its available to everyone on internet. Data will also be cleaned on this server regularly.
Why ZincSearch
While Elasticsearch is a very good product, it is complex and requires lots of resources and is more than a decade old. I built Zinc so it becomes easier for folks to use full text search indexing without doing a lot of work.
Features:
- Provides full text indexing capability
- Single binary for installation and running. Binaries available under releases for multiple platforms.
- Web UI for querying data written in Vue
- Compatibility with Elasticsearch APIs for ingestion of data (single record and bulk API)
- Out of the box authentication
- Schema less - No need to define schema upfront and different documents in the same index can have different fields.
- Index storage in disk (default), s3 or minio (deprecated)
- aggregation support
How to get support
Easiest way to get support is to join the Slack channel.
Roadmap items:
Public roadmap is available at https://github.com/orgs/zinclabs/projects/3/views/1
Please create an issue if you would like something to be added to the roadmap.
Screenshots
Search screen

User management screen

Getting started
Quickstart
Check Quickstart
Releases
ZincSearch has hundreds of production installations is in GA.
Editions
Feature |
Zinc |
Zinc Cloud |
Ideal use case |
App search |
Logs, metrics, traces (Immutable Data) |
Storage |
Disk |
Object (S3), GCS, Azure blob coming soon |
Preferred Use case |
App search |
Observability (Logs, metrics, traces) |
Max data supported |
100s of GBs |
Petabyte scale |
High availability |
Will be available soon |
Yes |
Open source |
Yes |
Yes, ZincObserve |
ES API compatibility |
Search and Ingestion |
Ingestion (Open source) and Search( enterprise) only |
GUI |
Basic |
Advanced for log search |
Cost |
Free (self hosting may cost money based on size) |
Free (self hosted), Generous free tier in cloud 200 GB ingest / month free. |
Get started |
Quick start |
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