Pagefind vs Algolia — which search engine wins for your brief, in 2026

Different shapes entirely. Pagefind is build-time WASM search for static sites — zero infrastructure, free forever. Algolia is hosted production search — polished, scalable, expensive. Pagefind wins for blogs, docs, marketing sites under ~25k pages. Algolia wins for production e-commerce, dynamic catalogues, and apps where search is a real product feature.

Score: Pagefind 3 · Algolia 3

• Which is the right pick for static sites?

  Pagefind

  Pagefind ships WASM at build time. Zero ops, free forever. Algolia is overkill for a 500-page docs site.

• Which is the right pick for dynamic e-commerce?

  Algolia

  Pagefind requires a build to update the index. Algolia handles real-time index updates. For commerce that matters.

• Which is cheaper?

  Pagefind

  Pagefind is free. Algolia has real costs at any non-trivial scale.

• Which scales to 100k+ documents?

  Algolia

  Pagefind index size grows with corpus. Past ~25k pages browser-fetch cost rises. Algolia handles millions of docs.

• Which has personalised / per-user search?

  Algolia

  Algolia supports per-user filtering, A/B testing, analytics. Pagefind is anonymous static search.

• Which is faster to ship?

  Pagefind

  Pagefind to first query is minutes — npm install, run pagefind, done. Algolia signup-to-production is longer.

• Static / Jamstack sites with fewer than ~25k pages
• Documentation, blogs, marketing sites where adding any service is overhead
• Astro / Hugo / Eleventy / Jekyll deployments
• Cost-zero search where infrastructure spend is not justified

Read the full Pagefind entry: /search/pagefind/

• E-commerce search where conversion lift justifies the bill
• Production search for funded startups that want to delete the operations problem
• Apps requiring instant-search UI with battle-tested components
• Multi-region search with predictable global latency

Read the full Algolia entry: /search/algolia/

The hard half is your typo tolerance, synonym dictionary, relevance tuning, and the analytics loop. The 30-min call is where you describe your corpus and your conversion bar; I tell you whether Pagefind or Algolia (or something else) is your fit.