Dexter vs Pro Search

Feature	Dexter	Pro Search
Search Engine	Uses Meilisearch or Algolia (built for search)	Uses MySQL full-text (built for storage)
Search Approach	Context-based, relevance-driven, semantic-style ranking	Keyword-only text matching
Speed & Performance	Lightning-fast, optimized for large datasets & instant results	Good performance on small/medium data, slower as content grows
Scalability	Designed for heavy traffic & large content sets	Limited by MySQL indexing & server load
Has JSON API	Yes	No
Content Types Indexed	Entries, categories, members, files, documents, images, custom sources	Primarily channel entries & categories
Filtering & Faceting	Advanced faceted filters, live updating, instant results	Basic filters (category, ranges, relationships)
Relevance & Ranking	Modern ranking rules, typo tolerance, fuzzy matching, contextual weighting	Field weighting only, limited full-text ranking
Search Experience	Ideal for autocomplete, instant search, headless/JS UIs	Traditional keyword search pages
Customization	Flexible indexing pipelines, transform/enrich data, API-driven	Collection settings, field weighting, basic API
Infrastructure	Requires Meilisearch or Algolia (self-hosted or SaaS)	No external services; runs entirely in EE
Indexing	Real-time + queued indexing; designed for continuous updates	Manual or triggered index rebuilds
Multimedia Support	Extracts text from PDFs, documents, metadata, AI image descriptions	No document or image indexing
Best For	Large sites, modern UX, multi-content search, fast performance	Smaller sites, simple keyword search needs