Redis Search is not ideal for our primary app search

Understood — if Redis Search isn’t a good fit for your primary application search, that’s a common conclusion. It’s often great for fast filtering, autocomplete, and lightweight search, but it can be limiting for richer relevance, ranking, typo tolerance, faceting, and large-scale search needs.

A few common alternatives:

• Elasticsearch / OpenSearch — best if you need strong full-text search, scoring, filters, aggregations, and scale.
• PostgreSQL full-text search — good if your search needs are moderate and you want to keep everything in your DB.
• Meilisearch — simpler to operate, very fast, good developer experience for app search.
• Typesense — similar to Meilisearch, often used for typo-tolerant product/app search.
• Algolia — excellent hosted option if you want speed and relevance with minimal ops.

A practical rule of thumb:

• If search is core product functionality, use a dedicated search engine.
• If search is secondary or internal, PostgreSQL or Redis can be enough.
• If you need complex ranking + analytics + large indexes, lean Elasticsearch/OpenSearch.
• If you want easy setup and great UX, consider Meilisearch/Typesense/Algolia.

If you want, I can help you choose the best replacement based on:

1. your data size,
2. query patterns,
3. relevance/typo tolerance needs,
4. operational constraints,
5. budget.