Weak built-in search, or a paid search vendor on top
Most commerce platforms ship a basic SQL LIKE wrapper and tell you to bolt a paid search vendor on top. Two vendors, two indexes, a per-query bill that scales with traffic.
Vendure ships search as a first-class plugin on the platform, indexing your catalogue and your admin entities into one engine. Self-hostable, open-source, and bundled in.
Three plugins on a single search engine
Each plugin solves a discrete problem on the same indexing layer. Use them together or independently.
Advanced search
Storefront product search. Faceted filtering, custom mappings for your data model, multi-language indexes, geo-search for stock-near-me, search analytics for merchandisers, synonyms, typo tolerance, result pinning. It replaces the paid per-query search vendor in your stack.
Global search
The Cmd+K command palette in the Admin Dashboard. Search products, orders, customers, collections, assets, and any custom entity you register, all in one prompt. Built on the same engine via Advanced Search's external index mechanism.
Wishlists
Multiple named lists per customer, anonymous-to-authenticated merge on sign-in, public sharing. A way for customers to come back to a curated set, and a signal on intent for merchandisers.
One indexing layer for the whole platform
Advanced Search runs the storefront engine. It also exposes an external index API any Vendure plugin can hook into to define its own collection. Global Search uses it for the Cmd+K palette. Your own plugins use it the same way for custom-entity search.
One search instance per Vendure deployment. Self-host it with the Vendure Platform licence, or have it managed on Vendure Cloud.
Three scenarios this category was built for
Each scenario runs on the same Typesense index. Pick the one that matters to your team first.
Trusted by complex B2B commerce and enterprise retail.
What teams ask about Vendure search and discovery
Questions we hear from engineering and product teams evaluating Vendure for a real catalogue.
One category in a wider plugin library
Search and discovery is one of five plugin categories on Vendure Platform, alongside B2B workflows, pricing and promotions, operations and extensibility, and governance and compliance. See the full plugin overview.
