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Stop guessing which one. Put them side by side.
Up to 4 tools, same rows for each: what it is, what it really costs, the trap, and how to wire it up. The URL carries your picks — send it to anyone.
Brave Search APIFuse.jsMiniSearch
Quick read
- Free with no card: Fuse.js, MiniSearch.
| Field | Brave Search APIbrave.com | Fuse.jsfusejs.io | MiniSearchgithub.com |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | Web search over Brave's own crawled index rather than a resold Google or Bing feed. Returns organic results, news, images and videos as structured JSON, with an Answers endpoint that generates a cited response. Enterprise plans offer full-funnel zero data retention. | A zero-dependency fuzzy-search library using the Bitap algorithm — roughly 6.8kB gzipped for the basic build, 8.6kB for the full one. Searches arrays of JS objects in memory with typo tolerance, field weighting, nested keys and extended query operators. Runs in browsers, Node and Deno. | A dependency-free JavaScript full-text search engine that builds a real inverted index in memory, in the browser or in Node. Supports prefix search, fuzzy matching, field boosting, modern relevance ranking, auto-suggestion, and adding or removing documents at any time. The index serializes to JSON so it can be prebuilt. |
| Category | Search, vector & RAG | Search, vector & RAG | Search, vector & RAG |
| Cost tier | paid | free | free |
| Pricing | $5/month in free credits applied automatically; no standing free query allowance. Search $5 per 1K requests at 50 QPS. Answers $4 per 1K requests plus $5 per million input/output tokens at 2 QPS. Enterprise custom. | Free, Apache-2.0. No service, no account, no limits, no bill. | Free, MIT-licensed. No service or account. |
| Why builders pick it | An independent index surfaces pages Google-derived APIs cannot, and the licensing is clean for AI grounding. It ships a first-party MCP server so agents can call it directly. | When a few hundred to a few thousand items already sit in your app state — a command palette, a settings list, a filterable table — this is ten lines of code and no infrastructure. | The step up from Fuse.js when you have tens of thousands of records — a proper index instead of rescoring every item per keystroke, still with no backend and no bill. |
| Watch out for | The $5 monthly credit is roughly 1,000 Search requests and there is no free plan beyond it. Long-tail coverage is shallower than Google's index. | It scores every item on every keystroke, so it degrades noticeably past roughly 10K records. Use MiniSearch or a real index above that. | The whole index ships to the client, so a large corpus means a large download. Prebuild and cache the serialized JSON rather than indexing on every page load. |
| How to wire it up | not logged | npm i fuse.js | npm i minisearch |
| Editor's pick | No | No | No |
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# Tool comparison — Brave Search API vs Fuse.js vs MiniSearch Source: Kbaise, a directory of tools that work with Lovable projects. Pick one and tell me why before writing any integration code. ## Brave Search API (brave-search-api) - URL: https://brave.com/search/api/ - Category: Search, vector & RAG - Cost: paid — $5/month in free credits applied automatically; no standing free query allowance. Search $5 per 1K requests at 50 QPS. Answers $4 per 1K requests plus $5 per million input/output tokens at 2 QPS. Enterprise custom. - What it is: Web search over Brave's own crawled index rather than a resold Google or Bing feed. Returns organic results, news, images and videos as structured JSON, with an Answers endpoint that generates a cited response. Enterprise plans offer full-funnel zero data retention. - Why builders pick it: An independent index surfaces pages Google-derived APIs cannot, and the licensing is clean for AI grounding. It ships a first-party MCP server so agents can call it directly. - Trap: The $5 monthly credit is roughly 1,000 Search requests and there is no free plan beyond it. Long-tail coverage is shallower than Google's index. - Full dossier: /api/public/tools/brave-search-api ## Fuse.js (fuse-js) - URL: https://www.fusejs.io - Category: Search, vector & RAG - Cost: free — Free, Apache-2.0. No service, no account, no limits, no bill. - What it is: A zero-dependency fuzzy-search library using the Bitap algorithm — roughly 6.8kB gzipped for the basic build, 8.6kB for the full one. Searches arrays of JS objects in memory with typo tolerance, field weighting, nested keys and extended query operators. Runs in browsers, Node and Deno. - Why builders pick it: When a few hundred to a few thousand items already sit in your app state — a command palette, a settings list, a filterable table — this is ten lines of code and no infrastructure. - Trap: It scores every item on every keystroke, so it degrades noticeably past roughly 10K records. Use MiniSearch or a real index above that. - Wiring: npm i fuse.js - Full dossier: /api/public/tools/fuse-js ## MiniSearch (minisearch) - URL: https://github.com/lucaong/minisearch - Category: Search, vector & RAG - Cost: free — Free, MIT-licensed. No service or account. - What it is: A dependency-free JavaScript full-text search engine that builds a real inverted index in memory, in the browser or in Node. Supports prefix search, fuzzy matching, field boosting, modern relevance ranking, auto-suggestion, and adding or removing documents at any time. The index serializes to JSON so it can be prebuilt. - Why builders pick it: The step up from Fuse.js when you have tens of thousands of records — a proper index instead of rescoring every item per keystroke, still with no backend and no bill. - Trap: The whole index ships to the client, so a large corpus means a large download. Prebuild and cache the serialized JSON rather than indexing on every page load. - Wiring: npm i minisearch - Full dossier: /api/public/tools/minisearch ## Quick read - Free with no card: Fuse.js, MiniSearch. ## Rules 1. Prefer the free tier when no budget was stated, and say what the ceiling is. 2. Read the full dossier before integrating. 3. Fetch /api/public/models before writing any AI model ID.
Agents can fetch the same thing: GET /api/public/compare?slugs=brave-search-api,fuse-js,minisearch