Sonic is a fast, lightweight and schema-less search backend. It ingests search texts and identifier tuples that can then be queried against in a microsecond's time.

Sonic can be used as a simple alternative to super-heavy and full-featured search backends such as Elasticsearch in some use-cases. It is capable of normalizing natural language search queries, auto-completing a search query and providing the most relevant results for a query. Sonic is an identifier index, rather than a document index; when queried, it returns IDs that can then be used to refer to the matched documents in an external database.

Query Editor: think of JS Fiddle for SQL queries. It's your way to share data in the organization in an open way, by sharing both the dataset and the query that generated it.
Visualizations: once you have a dataset, you can create different visualizations out of it.
Dashboards: combine several visualizations into a single dashboard.

A human-friendly tutorial for elasticsearch.