Pristy Search Service: Alfresco search stays 100% free
Pristy Search Service: Alfresco search stays 100% free
Good news for anyone who cares about a 100% free Alfresco Community. Since July 2026, Alfresco Community 26.2 has dropped Apache Solr — and the only alternative provided, Alfresco Search Community, does rely on free engines (OpenSearch, Elasticsearch), but its Alfresco connector is closed: distributed as a binary, with no published source code, and no final licence to date.
Jeci saw this shift coming and has been working for several months on another path: Pristy Search Service, an open source Alfresco search engine, a free fork of Alfresco Search Services that stays on vanilla Apache Solr 9. It’s now at version 1.1.0, tested with Alfresco Community 26.2, with public code on GitHub and GitLab.
A matter of security
The Solr 6.6.5 that Alfresco patched in-house was nearly ten years old, running on Lucene 6, whose upstream support ended years ago — with no security fixes possible any more should a flaw be found. For a CIO or a public body subject to audit requirements, running document search on an engine that old was no longer defensible.
That’s exactly why Jeci built this fork: to put Alfresco search back on a base that’s genuinely maintained by the Apache Foundation, with the security fixes that come with it. All links between Alfresco, Solr and the indexing trackers can also be encrypted with mTLS (mutual TLS: each component authenticates to the other with a certificate).
The solution offered by Hyland isn’t 100% free software, and we can’t ask our clients to choose between freedom and security.
The only 100% free path
Beyond security, this choice has another direct consequence: Pristy Search Service is now the only 100% free search option for Alfresco Community, from the engine all the way to the connector.
For small and medium infrastructures, up to around 50 million files, Solr is also the best solution: no extra infrastructure to run, no OpenSearch or Elasticsearch cluster to install and maintain on top. For larger volumes, Jeci can set up SolrCloud, Solr’s distributed architecture, as an alternative to OpenSearch — on the same free base.
Hyland, Alfresco’s publisher, has also featured this fork twice on its official blog (June 2026, September 2026), and built it into its community Docker installer as an option.
Lighter, more relevant, easier to follow
Version 1.1.0 doesn’t just modernise the engine, it also brings:
- around 10% disk space saved, thanks to index compression;
- a new reranking that brings the most recent documents forward in results;
- a new real-time indexing monitoring interface.
Jeci also offers support to keep Alfresco Community Edition in optimal operational condition, which includes this search module, for organisations that want to adopt it with confidence. To go further on the technical side — every version, migration details, how to try it — head to the full technical page:
What about Pristy?
We built Pristy Search Service for the community and for Pristy, our turnkey document management suite built on Alfresco Community. With Pristy, you don’t have to keep up with these changes yourself: a complete document management system (DMS), the Collabora Online online office suite, hosted with OVH or on your own servers — with security and maintenance already taken care of, search included, starting with Pristy 26.1. A 100% free, ready-to-use DMS, without ever depending on a closed-source vendor. Want to see it in action?