Apache Solr & Lucene in 2025: Community Momentum and Release Cadence

Apache Solr and Lucene have powered enterprise search for decades. But in a search ecosystem that’s evolving fast—how do these OGs hold up in 2025?

Let’s get straight to it: both Solr and Lucene are still alive and actively developed. Lucene reached version 10 in late 2024. Solr continues its 9.x lifecycle with patch releases like 9.8.0 landing in early 2025. There’s no official "death" of either project.

But the bigger story? Community momentum is thinning out.

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Solr's Cadence: Solid, but Slower

After splitting into a top-level project again in 2020, Solr picked up steam for a while. Solr 9 was a major release—modernized HTTP APIs, better cloud support, reduced reliance on ZooKeeper.

But since then, release velocity has slowed.

While Solr still gets updates, it lacks the aggressive roadmap and funding of rivals like Elasticsearch or OpenSearch. And the community is small. As noted by the maintainers themselves:

"We are a small group of passionate developers... We're trying our best, but Solr is lagging behind other open source search engines."
— Apache Solr project blog, 2024

Solr’s maturity is both a strength and a curse—it works, but its ecosystem isn’t growing the way it used to. Docs get updated. Patches roll out. But the pace? It’s cautious. Stable. Slow.

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Lucene: Technically Impressive, Quietly Powerful

Lucene continues to advance under the hood. Version 10 introduced performance gains, better hardware utilization, and support for modern JVMs like Java 21. In 2024 alone, Lucene had over 2,000 commits from nearly 100 contributors.

But Lucene is a low-level library—it doesn’t run on its own. Solr, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch… they build on it. So even if Lucene evolves, it won’t matter to most developers unless the tools around it do too.

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What This Means for You

If your org is still running Solr/Lucene in production, here’s the real takeaway:

• Solr is not dead—but it’s not moving fast
• You may be using versions that are already end-of-life, or about to be
• If the project slows further, patches and fixes could dry up

This matters. Because even if your search engine “just works,” that doesn’t mean it’s secure. A critical CVE tomorrow could mean no patch if you're not on the latest supported release.

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You Don’t Have to Migrate—But You Do Need a Plan

If you’re not ready to rewrite your app around Elasticsearch or OpenSearch, don’t panic. Solr and Lucene are stable. But you do need a way to stay protected.

That’s where HeroDevs’ Apache Solr & Lucene NES (Never-Ending Support) comes in.

We provide long-term security patches, compatibility updates, and compliance support for Apache Solr 8.11.x and Lucene—even after they’re officially end-of-life. Our engineering team keeps your version secure, supported, and running—so you can migrate on your own terms (or not at all).

No fire drills. No forced upgrades. Just reliable support for the tools you already use.

Stay Secure on Solr. We’ve Got You.

Explore HeroDevs’ Solr & Lucene NES and get expert-backed, enterprise-grade support for your legacy search stack.

Your system can keep running. We’ll make sure it stays secure.

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