serp.fast

Stract

Open-source, non-profit search engine building its own index with a focus on user-customizable ranking and transparency.

Nathan Kessler
By Nathan KesslerUpdated

Each tool is evaluated against our methodology using public docs, vendor demos, and hands-on testing.

Independent web indexes maintain their own crawl of the web, separate from Google or Bing. This independence is valuable for AI applications that need unbiased search results, want to avoid rate limits on commercial search engines, or need specialized coverage. Several of these indexes are open source, allowing full transparency into how results are ranked.

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Features

–JS Rendering
✓Structured Output
✓Open Source
✓Self-Hosted Option
Pricing:Free

Editorial assessment

The fully open-source search engine vision – user-configurable ranking signals, transparent algorithms, and a growing independent index. Philosophically aligned with how search should work. Extremely early-stage with a small index. Not viable as a primary search source for production applications. More of a research project and ideological statement than a production tool today.

How Stract compares

Mojeek

Mojeek has a more mature independent index if you want privacy-first search that actually works today.

Common Crawl

Common Crawl offers raw web data at massive scale if you want to build your own search.

See full Stract alternatives comparison →

Frequently asked questions

Is Stract free?

Yes. The hosted version of Stract is free with no paid tier, because it runs as a non-profit, open-source project rather than a commercial product. There is no usage-based pricing or subscription. One caveat: the project's public development has slowed, so confirm the hosted service is still live before you build anything that depends on it.

Is Stract open source?

Yes. Stract is fully open source under the AGPL-3.0 license. Its crawler, index, and ranking code are public on GitHub under the StractOrg organization, and the codebase is mostly Rust. Transparency is the point. You can read exactly how results get ranked. Note that upstream development has been quiet recently, so treat it as a source you can read and fork rather than an actively shipping project.

Can you self-host Stract?

Yes. Since the full stack is open source, you can build and run Stract locally from source by following the steps in its CONTRIBUTING file. The maintainers recommended the hosted version for most people, and self-hosting means operating your own crawler and index. That is a heavy lift, and with upstream activity having slowed, you would be maintaining a codebase that no one is updating for you.

Does Stract render JavaScript?

No. Stract is a search engine that crawls and indexes pages and returns results. It is not a scraping tool that loads and executes JavaScript on target pages for you. If you need to render client-side content from specific sites, this is the wrong category of tool. Its distinguishing feature is user-configurable ranking through "optics" files, which let you reweight or filter results by source type.

What is the best Stract alternative?

Mojeek is the closest alternative and the more practical pick for production. Like Stract, it runs its own independent crawler and index, but that index is far larger and it offers a documented search API, which Stract does not. Pick Mojeek when you need an independent index you can query programmatically today. Pick Stract as a research project, or when transparent, user-customizable ranking matters more to you than coverage.

How does Stract compare to Mojeek?

Both build their own index, independent of Google and Microsoft. Mojeek has crawled the web since 2006, has a much larger index, and exposes a public API for developers. Stract's index is small and early-stage, and it has no commercial API. Its draw is open-source transparency and the "optics" customization system. For coverage and integration, Mojeek wins. For inspectable, configurable ranking, Stract is the more interesting one.

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