Algolia vs. Apache Lucene

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Algolia
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Algolia in San Francisco, California offers enterprise search as a service.
$0
per month 10,000 search requests + 1 Million records
Apache Lucene
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Apache Lucene is an open source and free text search engine library written in Java. It is a technology suitable for applications that requires full-text search, and is available cross-platform.
$0
per month
Pricing
AlgoliaApache Lucene
Editions & Modules
Build
$0
per month Up to 10,000 search requests + 1 Million records
Grow
$0.50
per month per 1,000 search requests
Algolia Recommend
$0.60
per month per 1,000 Recommend requests
Premium
Custom
per month Customized pricing
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AlgoliaApache Lucene
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional DetailsPay as you go, scale instantly, or upgrade anytime for advanced features and capabilities.A free and open source product.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AlgoliaApache Lucene
Considered Both Products
Algolia
Chose Algolia
Algolia is much easier to use than the competition and requires no system maintenance. It is however much more expensive.
Apache Lucene

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
AlgoliaApache Lucene
Small Businesses
Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch
Score 8.3 out of 10
Algolia
Algolia
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Guru
Guru
Score 9.0 out of 10
Guru
Guru
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Guru
Guru
Score 9.0 out of 10
Guru
Guru
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AlgoliaApache Lucene
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(44 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.7
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
6.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
9.6
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.4
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
5.7
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.4
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
AlgoliaApache Lucene
Likelihood to Recommend
Algolia
Algolia offers a wide range of capabilities that can benefit any business by addressing their specific requirements. Integrating with this platform is seamless, and their extensive knowledgebase and training resources are highly valuable for both developers and UI users. We have already witnessed the advantages of this product and are eagerly anticipating future enhancements as we continue to expand our platform, with Algolia as our primary tool for enhancing our search experience.
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Apache
Apache Lucene is a perfect text search implementation where the heap space usage needs to be kept to its minimal. It also enables search based on various search fields and most importantly the search and index process can happen simultaneously. The only scenario where it might be less appropriate would be when the index size grows too big. We have witnessed few scalable issues where the search would take a while when the index size is too large.
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Pros
Algolia
  • Easy setup and configuration of fast search results across multiple types of object
  • Can be used to power sales pages, category headings, category product listings, help articles and more within the same search results
  • Managing synonyms, blocked words and other product requirements can be done without engineering support
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Apache
  • We found Apache Lucene to be extremely performant in querying large amounts of data and retrieving the correct files based on the metadata provided.
  • The online community offers great support for the product. Even though it is an open source tool, it is not difficult to find help online for it.
  • When we were creating a proof of concept application, we found that the software worked just as well, while being run locally on a resource-limited PC.
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Cons
Algolia
  • Recent pricing model changes made Algolia considerably more expensive. I understand that companies change their models all the time, but my plan almost doubled in price overnight. They let me keep my legacy plan for as long as I wanted, but I had already outgrown it, so a small increase in demand caused big price spikes. It's still cheap for what it is though.
  • The documentation is generally good, but sometimes hard to navigate. I was trying to find examples of how to combine geo-queries with normal ones, and I couldn't find an example, but it wasn't actually hard to figure out.
  • Some of the advanced features can be hard to understand at first. This isn't really a con, as it just means Algolia is loaded with features, but I was a bit overwhelmed the first time I tried to customize an index.
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Apache
  • User interface for setup and maintenance would be helpful.
  • Easier cloud/cluster setup.
  • Better, centralized documentation.
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Likelihood to Renew
Algolia
Algolia is a great tool, we didn't have to build a custom search platform (using Elasticsearch for example) for a while. It has great flexibility and the set of libraries and SDKs make using it really easy. However, there are two major blockers for our future: - Their pricing it's still a bit hard to predict (when you are used to other kind of metrics for usage) so I really recommend to take a look at it first. - Integrating it within a CI/CD pipeline is difficult to replicate staging/development environments based on Production.
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Apache
No answers on this topic
Usability
Algolia
Algolia has a good interface and they have done some improvements. However, some non technical users have a challenging time in the use for the first days of learning. But once the main aspects are learned is a straight forward operation
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Apache
No answers on this topic
Reliability and Availability
Algolia
Having used Algolia for over 5 years we have experienced zero downtime. I'd say that's pretty good.
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Apache
No answers on this topic
Performance
Algolia
Performance is always a major concern when integrating services with our client's websites. Our tests and real-world experience show that Algolia is highly performant. We have more extremely satisfied with the speed of both the search service APIs and the backend administrative and analytic interface.
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Apache
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Algolia
It’s non existent. No tech support and no customer service… my application was blocked and is currently inactive causing huge business disruption, and I’m still waiting days later for a response to an issue which could be resolved very very quickly if only they would respond. Very poor from a company of that size
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Apache
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Algolia
While AWS's offering is a typically cheaper solution, it requires a lot of work to gain any of the core features of Algolia. The cost of dev time and long-term maintenance would be more than the costs incurred with Algolia, which is why it made the most sense financially. On the engineering side, we could give our stakeholders access to Algolia to adjust the indices themselves, which would allow us to focus on other work.
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Apache
The search and index performance of [Apache] Lucene is excellent and the quality of results is good, if not better. For implementing it with small scale applications it is a no brainer, Lucene is the best and most cost effective solution. Learning curve is not too steep either.
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Scalability
Algolia
Overall is a scalable tool as the environment and the backend functions are the same and many things are done directly on the tool so without the need of further specific developments. However some things could be improved such as documentation for integration that could help in doing whitelabel solutions
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Apache
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Algolia
  • Users who had abandoned our product (attributing slow search speeds as the reason) returned to us thanks to Algolia
  • We used Algolia as our product's backbone to relaunch it, making it the center of all search on our platform which paid off massively.
  • Considering we relaunched our product, with Aloglia functioning as its engine, we got a lot of press coverage for our highly improved search speeds.
  • One negative would be how important it is to read the fine print when it comes to the technical documentation. As pricing is done on the basis of records and indexes, it is not made apparent that there is a size limit for your records or how quickly these numbers can increase for any particular use case. Be very wary of these as they can quite easily exceed your allotted budget for the product.
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Apache
  • Being an open source project we did not have to pay any licensing fees for using Apache Lucene. It has greatly improved our search functionality in our web apps.
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ScreenShots

Algolia Screenshots

Screenshot of Index & Query Rules Management: Query Rules helps to enhance an engine's ranking behavior for specific queries. Setting up rules can uncover and enable users to respond more specifically to the intent behind users' queries.Screenshot of Query Monitoring: Offers insight into the status, performance and overall activity happening within the search engine.Screenshot of Algolia Analytics: The search bar is a feedback form. Algolia's analytics drives insights from search to click to conversion.Screenshot of Algolia Dashboard: Products to accelerate search and discovery experiences across any device and platform.Screenshot of Advanced front-end libraries, API clients, and extensive documentation to help developers build, deploy, and maintain.Screenshot of To get started users simply choose an index, denote the events, and choose a model.

Apache Lucene Screenshots

Screenshot of Screenshot of