The problem
I've been working with Manticore Search for about two years at EricaPRO, building the search layer for two financial data platforms. For the past year, that work has been a Laravel API.
Manticore was never the problem. It's fast and it's stable. The problem was the gap between Manticore and Laravel.
I had already built a package for this — laravel-manticore-search, a fluent builder over Manticore's HTTP/JSON API. It works, and it's still in use. But it's a client wrapper. Every feature had to be implemented manually. Every new filter or facet meant more custom architecture around the client, and none of the things Laravel gives you for free — models, migrations, pagination, casts — applied to it.
Scout doesn't close that gap either. Scout gives you search(). No full query builder, no migrations for your indexes, sync is your problem. That's not a criticism — Scout abstracts over engines with completely different APIs, so it exposes the lowest common denominator. It just wasn't what I needed.
