Algolia vs Azure Search

• Algolia is brain-dead simple to set up. I've implemented search with Algolia in a dozen different ways now, and it never took me longer than a few minutes to get the functionality I want. With Algolia, the only challenge is designing your search UI -- if you don't want to use their baked in UI solutions.
• Results come back incredibly fast. I'm not sure how Algolia does it, but every keystroke I make in a search field returns new results instantly. It's hard to believe that I'm searching large datasets on a remote server when it works so fast.
• Very little customization is needed for 99% of use-cases. Algolia's out of the box setup works great, and it takes no prior knowledge to set up.

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• Azure Search provides a fully-managed service for loading, indexing, and querying content.
• Azure Search has an easy C# SDK that allows you to implement loading and retrieving data from the service very easy. Any developer with some Microsoft experience should feel immediate familiarity.
• Azure Search has a robust set of abilities around slicing and presenting the data during a search, such as narrowing by geospatial data and providing an auto-complete capabilities via "Suggesters".
• Azure Search has one-of-a-kind "Cognitive Search" capabilities that enable running AI algorithms over data to enrich it before it is stored into the service. For example, one could automatically do a sentiment analysis when ingesting the data and store that as one of the searchable fields on the content.

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• Algolia can be a bit complex -- for smaller companies or companies without many tech resources, it may be difficult to implement and use without the help of a third party
• Manually manipulating search results (for specific queries having listings show up first) is a bit difficult to do without custom developing that functionality

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• It's an enterprise level product so you need to have the budget for it.
• Challenging-to-impossible for a non-technical administrator to implement.
• It further locks you into Microsoft's ecosystem and doesn't play well with non-Microsoft software. Depending on your point of view, this can be a pro or a con.

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• It's too early to measure any increase in our transactions
• We have good customer feedback on the Algolia search function
• We are looking at other apps in development where we can also leverage the power of Algolia

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• Our internal market research illustrates that users are finding their desired information faster on account of autosuggest.
• Time spent on checkout page (for conversions) is significantly decreased.
• Clicks required on checkout page (for conversions) is significantly decreased.

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