Sourcegraph vs Zoekt

Where Zoekt wins

The licence is the whole point

Apache-2.0, with a patent grant, no field-of-use restriction and no competing-use clause. Nothing on this page is easier to get through a legal review. That matters more than usual here, because the reason most readers arrived on this site is a licence change: Sourcegraph relicensed off Apache-2.0 in June 2023 and made its core repository private in August 2024. Adopting Zoekt puts you back on the licence Sourcegraph left, using code Sourcegraph still writes.

Same engine, same speed

Zoekt is a trigram index, the technique behind Google Code Search, which is why arbitrary regular expressions return in milliseconds across millions of files instead of requiring a scan. When people say Sourcegraph is fast, this is the thing they are describing. You are not adopting a lesser search engine to save money; you are adopting the same one without the product wrapped around it.

It composes into things a product cannot

Because it is a library and a pair of binaries rather than an application, Zoekt goes places a hosted product cannot follow: inside an internal developer portal, behind a chat command, into a security tool that needs to grep every branch of every repository nightly, or under an agent that searches code as a tool call. Several of the other projects on this site are, in effect, opinionated interfaces over this engine. If your requirement is unusual, building on the engine is faster than bending someone else's product to it.

There is no vendor to be repriced by

The failure mode this entire page documents cannot recur. A published Apache-2.0 grant on code already released is not revocable, so the worst case is that Sourcegraph stops maintaining the repository and the community forks it, which is precisely what happened when Google stopped maintaining the original in 2017.

Where Sourcegraph still wins

Everything that is not search. Permissions are the sharpest example: Sourcegraph enforces per-repository access so an engineer never sees code they are not entitled to, and Zoekt has no concept of a user at all. If you index private repositories with it, you are responsible for the proxy, the authentication and the authorisation in front of it, and getting that wrong leaks source code rather than merely inconveniencing people. Repository synchronisation is the same shape of problem: keeping indexes current across several hosts and thousands of branches is a real service, and Sourcegraph has already written it.

There is also no tagged release. For a piece of infrastructure that some organisations must pin, patch and attest, "build from main" is a genuine obstacle rather than a stylistic quibble. And Sourcegraph's precise navigation, Batch Changes and Code Insights are not adjacent to Zoekt's scope at all; they are separate products that happen to sit above the same index. Choosing the engine means choosing to do without them, permanently, not later.

Migrating Sourcegraph to Zoekt

The path most teams take:

1. Decide honestly whether you are a platform team. If nobody will own this after the person who set it up moves on, use Sourcebot or OpenGrok instead. Adopting a component means adopting maintenance, and an abandoned internal search server is worse than none.
2. Index a single repository first. Run the indexer over one large repository and the web server over the result. This takes an afternoon and immediately tells you what index size and query latency look like on your actual code, which no benchmark will.
3. Write the sync and the front door. The two pieces you are building are a job that keeps repositories and branches indexed, and an authenticating proxy in front of the search server. Neither is large; both are yours forever. Budget the proxy properly, because it is the piece that protects private source.
4. What does not move. Saved searches, code monitors, Batch Changes, Code Insights and every Sourcegraph permalink in your issue tracker. Zoekt replaces the query box and nothing else, and that is the correct expectation to set with the team before, not after, the contract lapses.