Posts tagged with #search from the Contra Collective team.
Algolia vs Typesense vs Meilisearch for Shopify Plus headless search at 100K plus SKU scale. Total cost of ownership, operational burden, indexing pipeline complexity, and the procurement decision for enterprise commerce in 2026.
Sanity has won the headless CMS slot for serious commerce front-ends. The structured content model, the GROQ query language, and the Studio editing experience map well to product-heavy storefronts running on Shopify Hydrogen, Next.js Commerce, or Remix. What Sanity does not ship is search. Once your storefront grows past a few hundred SKUs, the search infrastructure decision becomes the next architecture choice that shapes how the storefront scales.
The headless commerce search stack has converged on three names in 2026: Meilisearch, Typesense, and Algolia. Each one has a real production user base, each one wins on a different axis, and each one fits a specific Hydrogen build pattern. We have shipped Shopify Plus headless storefronts with all three engines over the last 18 months. This is the comparison from the integration side, not the marketing side.