# Tantivy

8 Hacker News commenters recommended Tantivy and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Rust full-text search library that people pick over SQLite for BM25 search and use as the search engine in their own tools.

## Why people recommend it

- Chosen as go-to search engine (2 comments): "SQLite + sqlite-vec + Tantivy + a tiny embedding model will stay as my go to." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48832659)) "If we ever add persistent cross-session indexing, Tantivy would be the move." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47153527))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Apache Lucene](https://hackerapproved.com/p/apache-lucene.md): 12 recommend
- [PHP-fts](https://hackerapproved.com/p/php-fts.md): 6 recommend
- [Lunr.js](https://hackerapproved.com/p/lunr-js.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Tantivy", https://hackerapproved.com/p/tantivy/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).