It is closer to Apache Lucene than to Elasticsearch or Apache Solr in the sense it is not an off-the-shelf search engine server, but rather a crate that can be used to build such a search engine. Companies like Element, Humanfirst, and Nuclia have used Tantivy to unleash the horse-powers in their search queries. There are many ways to use Tantivy. Tantivy can be run in the browser with a WASM file. For Ruby-lovers, Tantiny offers close Ruby bindings for Tantivy . Lastly, you can install Python bindings in Tantivy-Py repo. Features of Tantivy include, but are not limited to: - Full-text search - Configurable tokenizer (stemming available for 17 Latin languages with third party support for Chinese (tantivy-jieba and cang-jie), Japanese (lindera, Vaporetto, and tantivy-tokenizer-tiny-segmenter) and Korean (lindera + lindera-ko-dic-builder) - Fast (check out the 🐎 ? benchmark ? 🐎) - Tiny startup time (<10ms), perfect for command-line tools - BM25 scoring (the same as Lucene) - Natural query language (e.g. (michael AND jackson) OR "king of pop") - Phrase queries search (e.g. "michael jackson") - Incremental indexing - Multithreaded indexing (indexing English Wikipedia takes < 3 minutes on my desktop) - Mmap directory - SIMD integer compression when the platform/CPU includes the SSE2 instruction set - Single valued and multivalued u64, i64, and f64 fast fields (equivalent of doc values in Lucene) - &[u8] fast fields - Text, i64, u64, f64, dates, and hierarchical facet fields - LZ4 compressed document store - Range queries - Faceted search - Configurable indexing (optional term frequency and position indexing) - JSON Field - Aggregation Collector: range buckets, average, and stats metrics - LogMergePolicy with deletes - Searcher Warmer API - Cheesy logo with a horse (obviously an amazing feature) Non-features include: Distributed search is out of the scope of Tantivy, but if you are looking for this feature, check out Quickwit. It is our search engine, built on top of Tantivy.