Zinc 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.

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.

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.

1. Provides full text indexing capability
2. Single binary for installation and running. Binaries available under releases for multiple platforms.
3. Web UI for querying data written in Vue
4. Compatibility with Elasticsearch APIs for ingestion of data (single record and bulk API)
5. Out of the box authentication
6. Schema less - No need to define schema upfront and different documents in the same index can have different fields.
7. Index storage in disk (default), s3 or minio (experimental)
8. aggregation support

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.

Check Quickstart

ZincSearch currently has most of its API contracts frozen. It's data format may still experience changes as we improve things. Currently ZincSearch is in beta. Data format should become highly stable when we move to GA (version 1).

Check the contributing guide . Also check the roadmap items

Feature	Zinc	Zinc Cloud
Ideal use case	App search	Logs and Events (Immutable Data)
Storage	Disk	Object (S3), GCS, Azure blob coming soon
Preferred Use case	App search	Log / event search
Max data supported	100s of GBs	Petabyte scale
High availability	Will be available soon	Yes
Open source	Yes	Willl soon be available
ES API compatibility	Search and Ingestion	Ingestion only
GUI	Basic	Advanced for log search
Cost	Free (self hosting may cost money based on size)	Generous free tier. 1 TB ingest / month free. Pricing to be finalized upon GA.
Get started	Quick start