Algolia offers AI-powered solutions to improve online search and discovery experiences, with tools for business teams and APIs for developers that help to improve user engagement and conversions across websites, apps, and e-commerce platforms.
$0
for 10k search requests + 100k records per month
Apache Solr
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Apache Solr is an open-source enterprise search server.
N/A
Luigi's Box
Score 9.6 out of 10
N/A
Luigi’s Box solutions understand customer behavior, and use data to provide better search results, recommend relevant products, and enhance the shopping experience to boost your e-commerce conversion rates and average order values. Search and Autocomplete Recommender Product Listing Shopping Assistant Analytics
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Pricing
Algolia
Apache Solr
Luigi's Box
Editions & Modules
Build
Free
Up to 10,000 search requests + 1 Million records
Grow Plus
Free to start, then pay-as-you-go
10,000 search requests/month and 100,000 records included; $1.75 per additional 1K search requests and $0.40 per additional 1K records
Grow
Free to start, then pay-as-you-go
10,000 search requests/month and 100,000 records included; $0.50 per additional 1K search requests and $0.40 per additional 1K records
Elevate
custom
per year
Elevate
Custom
Custom Custom search requests and records; volume-based discounts available
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Algolia
Apache Solr
Luigi's Box
Free Trial
Yes
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Required
Additional Details
Pay as you go, scale instantly, or upgrade anytime for advanced features and capabilities.
We selected Algolia because it was ridiculously fast and we liked the direction the company was going. We also did not want to deal with a self hosted solution like Solr.
We chose it for the ease of implementation, the willingness of the staff and the quality results they have achieved so far. We read a lot of positive reviews about them, from which we learned that they really deliver what they promise. Real reviews are extremely important and …
Verified User
Analyst
Chose Luigi's Box
Luigi's Box offers a sweet spot between functionalities and price. While implementation was somewhat lengthy the usability is more important as you would stay with the solution for longer time. And this is where Luigi's Box excels as it's very intuitive and easy to work with. …
Luigi's Box is much easier to set up and maintain. Most features are ready to go without the need to study extensive documentation or do additional training. It does not allow you the flexibility to change EVERYTHING right away.
As Luigi's Box is a slovak company as well as ours, we had better negotiating options and we managed to negotiate a better price. We also consider Luigi's Box as a tool that is one of the easiest to implement. Regarding features, there were not any big differences. We were also …
Easier to implement and use in daily, the search engine is faster and better, to be honest is the best. We have one solution for recommenders, searching, and listings. We managed to agree to favorable contract terms + Communication with tool support is perfect. We have solved …
Algolia is both well-suited to replace Shopify's out-of-the-box search and to very large sites with millions of products in their catalog. Algolia provides a specialized solution that benefits from very large R&D budgets and ongoing investment. Algolia offers a more retail- and open-design solution than competitors such as Amazon or Google search, which offer fewer options and fewer features.
Solr spins up nicely and works effectively for small enterprise environments providing helpful mechanisms for fuzzy searches and facetted searching. For larger enterprises with complex business solutions you'll find the need to hire an expert Solr engineer to optimize the powerful platform to your needs. Internationalization is tricky with Solr and many hosting solutions may limit you to a latin character set.
Luigi's Box is the perfect solution for sales platforms that have search engine problems on their site. Luigi's Box allows you to go to the next level and enable customers to find what they are looking for. With additional options to recommend and indicate substitutes and add-on products, it can work great as a sales-boosting element.
Users get instant feedback as they type, even with complex filters like brand, model, price range, and financing eligibility. This speed significantly improves engagement and reduces bounce.
A user searching for “Camry 2020” or even “Camary 20” still sees relevant Toyota Camry listings from 2020. This reduces friction, especially on mobile where spelling errors are common.
Algolia handles multi-faceted filters efficiently. For example, a user can filter by location, transmission type, color, or inspection status without any lag.
We fine-tune the ranking of search results based on what matters to our business—like prioritizing cars with higher margins or better availability in key cities.
We can experiment with different ranking formulas or UI variations to improve KPIs like lead conversion or time-to-first-interaction.
Easy to get started with Apache Solr. Whether it is tackling a setup issue or trying to learn some of the more advanced features, there are plenty of resources to help you out and get you going.
Performance. Apache Solr allows for a lot of custom tuning (if needed) and provides great out of the box performance for searching on large data sets.
Maintenance. After setting up Solr in a production environment there are plenty of tools provided to help you maintain and update your application. Apache Solr comes with great fault tolerance built in and has proven to be very reliable.
Recognising synonyms and mis-spellings to still show our customers accurate and relevant search results.
Great analytics section showing trending searches and non-converting searches, aiding in future product development and our priorities for what products we want to show the customer.
The boost function which allows us to prioritise showing customers certain products over others, which improves conversions.
Better integration of features (ex. synonyms feature is great but isn't respected by their re-ranking product)
Tooling to reduce spam search queries being triaged by system/logged to analytics panels
More automated summaries of analytics (ie. recommend synonyms to add, trends noticed in search volume in specific areas of site, easier ways to leverage API vs using website UI)
These examples are due to the way we use Apache Solr. I think we have had the same problems with other NoSQL databases (but perhaps not the same solution). High data volumes of data and a lot of users were the causes.
We have lot of classifications and lot of data for each classification. This gave us several problems:
First: We couldn't keep all our data in Solr. Then we have all data in our MySQL DB and searching data in Solr. So we need to be sure to update and match the 2 databases in the same time.
Second: We needed several load balanced Solr databases.
Third: We needed to update all the databases and keep old data status.
If I don't speak about problems due to our lack of experience, the main Solr problem came from frequency of updates vs validation of several database. We encountered several locks due to this (our ops team didn't want to use real clustering, so all DB weren't updated). Problem messages were not always clear and we several days to understand the problems.
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.
Algolia is very intuitive to use, especially the Merchandising Studio. The application provides a virtually seamless view of how product will appear on the frontend and making adjustments is fluid and reflects immediately online. Some slow-down occurs when you have a lot of rules enabled or are pinning / boosting a lot of product. But overall it functions very solidly.
It takes some time to deploy and currectly maintein it. And also, to learn how to use and integrate in the enviroment as well. Once you get theses steps done, it usability is very simple, and almost of the time it don't require no further attention on it. Even for maintence, if you deploy it on a cluster mode, it is very reliable and easy to take one host down.
As I mentioned in the previous points, Luigis Box helped us to improve the overall services for our customers, whether in the area of product search, optimization of various processes, improvement of service quality, etc. Within our company, all of us who work with him are really satisfied with him. If we were to recommend the tool we use to other companies, Luigi's Box would be a clear choice for us :)
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.
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
Algolia gives way more control for a non-developer than AWS Elasticsearch Service. Previously we'd have to have our developers make adjustments to site search relevancy, typos, prioritizing certain attributes over others, etc. but now the marketing and website team can do that themselves in the Algolia dashboard
We tried to use both Elasticsearch and Swiftype with Drupal 8 but there are currently no good modules that integrate Drupal with those solutions. So Solr was really the only option for a Drupal 8 web site. It's not as easy to learn or use as Swiftype, but in the end I think it will be a little less expensive and offer more customization and flexibility.
The price is a lot better than Clerk, and the speed of integration is much simpler. Our IT team had so many issues intergating Clerk and the price kept on increasing. Whereas with Luigi's Box it was the exact opposite. Price is good for the system you receive and the integration is easy.
Algolia has been a consistent product that works flawless with very few errors or downtime. With the plan options it’s very easy for us to scale especially with this usage pricing. We have 100% gotten our ROI on this product.
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.
