Hister
Personal web search engine with automatic indexing of visited websites. Supports offline local result previews, local files, multi-user handling and optional semantic search.
Description from awesome-selfhosted (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Still maintained? Yes: 626 commits in the last 90 days, latest release v0.21.0 (Oct 2026).
Comparisons in Search Engines: Algolia alternatives, Google Search alternatives.
At a glance
Hister quick facts
- Health score
- 95/100 GOOD
- Stars
- 6,172
- Last commit
- yesterday (Oct 2026)
- Latest release
- v0.21.0, Oct 2026
- Licence
- AGPL-3.0
Top alternatives to Hister
In its own words
The project's README opens: "Hister is a private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep. It indexes their full contents so you can find information again from the web interface, terminal, or an AI assistant connected through MCP."
Why it ranks here
Health score explained
Hister scores 95/100, #5 of 16 in Search Engines: 626 commits in the last 90 days earn 35.0 of 35 points, the latest release (v0.21.0, 3 days ago) earns 25.0 of 25, 6,172 stars add 15.2 of 20, an active, unarchived repository keeps 10 and Docker support adds the final 10. That places it in the good band (70 and above). The biggest shortfall is star count, worth 4.8 more points.
Recomputed nightly from the GitHub API. How the score is calculated.
- Commit activity 35.0 / 35
626 commits in 90 days (30+ scores full marks)
- Release recency 25.0 / 25
v0.21.0 released 3 days ago
- Stars biggest shortfall 15.2 / 20
6.2k stars on GitHub (logarithmic)
- Not archived 10.0 / 10
Repository is active
- Docker support 10.0 / 10
Docker image or Compose file available
Commit activity
- 626
- Last 90 days
- 2,014
- Last 12 months
- yesterday
- Last push
Ranked #5 of 16 tools in Search Engines by health , between Manticore Search (#4) and Fess (#6) .
Details
| Licence | AGPL-3.0 |
| Platforms | Go, Docker |
| Latest release | v0.21.0 · 3 days ago |
| Stars | 6,172 |
| Open issues | 48 |
| Docker | Yes |
| Repository | asciimoo/hister ↗ |
Hister vs its top 5 alternatives
Active tools that share a category with Hister (Search Engines), scored on the same five terms.
| Tool | Health | Stars | Licence | Last commit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MeiliSearch | 99 | 60k | MIT | yesterday |
| Hister (this tool) | 95 | 6.2k | AGPL-3.0 | yesterday |
| Meme Search | 92 | 766 | Apache-2.0 | 11 days ago |
| Apache Solr | 68 | 1.7k | Apache-2.0 | today |
| Aleph | 50 | 2.5k | MIT | 8 months ago |
| Sosse | 22 | 2 | AGPL-3.0 | 7 months ago |
Hister: common questions
Is Hister still maintained?
Hister had 626 commits in the last 90 days and its last push was yesterday; the latest tagged release, v0.21.0, is from 3 days ago. Repoly recomputes this nightly.
Run itSponsored
Run Hister on a VPS from $4/mo
Hister ships a Docker image, so any of these providers can run it on a small instance.
- is*hosting NVMe VPS in 20+ locations, hourly billing from $5/mo Deploy ↗
- ProHoster VPS with DDoS protection included from $4/mo Deploy ↗
- GODLIKE Game and app servers on NVMe from $4/mo Deploy ↗
Affiliate links. Repoly may earn a commission, which never affects health scores.