Powerful, fast, and open source — with great potential for growth

[krajcik]

I use Manticore Search and Manticore Buddy through the SQL interface.

What I like most is its high performance, SQL-like syntax, and the fact that it’s fully open source. It’s easy to get started and works very efficiently even under heavy load.

At the same time, there are areas where I’d love to see Manticore grow further — especially in terms of deeper ML integration. For some of our use cases, Manticore still can’t fully replace Qdrant.
A built-in UI tool for managing Manticore would also be great, as well as more advanced documentation — with step-by-step examples for specific use cases like clustering. The current docs are solid, but it sometimes takes extra time to piece things together.

One big improvement I’d love to see is an online schema change mechanism — something like shadow tables or aliases, ideally with a migration framework underneath. Versioned schemas, commit/rollback support, and compatibility validation would make life a lot easier.
And if possible, it would also help to remove the limit on sorting by five fields.

Overall, I’d rate my experience 8 out of 10. Manticore is already a great open source engine and has a lot of potential to become even stronger.

Nikita Krajcik

[airolg]

Thank you for such a thoughtful and detailed review!
We’re really glad to hear that you appreciate Manticore’s performance, SQL interface, and open-source nature — those are core principles we care deeply about.

Your feedback about ML integration, schema migrations, and documentation is extremely valuable. The ideas you mentioned — like online schema changes, versioned migrations, and easier clustering examples — perfectly reflect the kinds of improvements we want to keep working toward.

A UI management tool and extended ML capabilities are also on our radar, and it’s great to know these features would make a real difference for your use cases.

Thank you again for taking the time to share your insights and for using Manticore in serious, data-intensive projects. We truly appreciate your support and feedback — it helps us shape where Manticore goes next!