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
per month 10k search requests + 100k records
BigCommerce
Score 7.8 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
BigCommerce is a SaaS platform that allows SMBs to develop eCommerce sites. Features include the capabilities to design the storefront, configure products, manage payments, generate traffic, and optimize conversion.
$39
per month
Pricing
Algolia
BigCommerce
Editions & Modules
Build
Free
per month Up to 10,000 search requests + 1 Million records
Grow Plus
Free / Pay as you go
per month 10K searches/month & 100K records included; $1.75 per extra 1K searches, $0.40 per extra 1K records
Grow
Free / Pay as you go
per month 10K search requests & 100K records included; $0.50 per extra 1K searches, $0.40 per extra 1K records
Elevate
custom
per year
Elevate
Custom
per year Custom search requests and records — volume-based discounts available
Standard
$39
per month
Plus
$105
per month
Pro
$399
per month
Enterprise
Custom
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Algolia
BigCommerce
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
Pay as you go, scale instantly, or upgrade anytime for advanced features and capabilities.
SLI- We used SLI for about 8 years prior to Algolia and Aloglia is far more sophisticated in terms of Typo Tolerance, Synonyms and AI capabilities. It also allows for much easier global rule setting so that we can easily promote our Proprietary Brands.
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.
BigCommerce is really well suited for someone who wants to get selling quickly, but may not have endless developer experience, or even web design experience for that matter. Their templates, even the free ones, are very attractive and supported by tons of third party apps. I think the only times it is not a slam dunk recommendation would be if someone is dead set on using another solution like Shopify, or if they are not looking for an ecommerce site and more of a flat website, this would be overkill.
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.
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)
In my experience, customer support FAILS terribly in knowledge of getting a BC site live
In my experience, the back side/ dashboard is very archaic compared to Volusion, will add hours of work to your week.
In my experience, pretty much anything you NEED is done with an "app" at additional cost. I think we have a few hundred dollars in apps already on top of cost of BigCommerce.
I feel coming from Volusion to BigCommerce was so depressing but we do feel secure that the company will remain in business. We are looking for something else already.
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.
I personally would not even consider another e-commerce website platform.
Bigcommerce may have the same (or close to the same) functionality and integrations as other SaaS platforms but they excel at customer service and tech support. At the end of the day you need a company that will answer the phone in less than a minute especially if you're having a 5 alarm issue. That said, we hardly ever have any issues. The site was down for a few minutes one time 5 years ago. Sometimes we have issues with coding or apps and they help me with that too. They even walked me through installing our new theme when the contracted developers told me that wasn't included in the development of our new website.
Bigcommerce comes out with new innovations every year, not including apps that other people write for the platform, and there are a lot of those and new ones all the time. And there are a LOT of awesome themes to choose from (Halothemes are the best).
And the price is reasonable!
I'd give Bigcommerce my business any time and recommend them to anyone looking to run an e-commerce website. You could even use them for a non-shopping site, we have one of those too!
Personally I find the Algolia integration not very complicated and the service super reactive. In terms of configuration, it's quite complete, at the end what matters is what we are able to index on Algolia. With rich data, the tool is amazing and a lot of things are possible.
I think that overall it has a great front end for the customer. On the back end, it takes a little spin-up time, but in just a couple of hours you can really have your head wrapped around everything you're going to need 99% of the time. It takes me about 5 minutes to train a new user on how to interact with customer orders.
So far in my time with BigCommerce I have not had any down time when it comes to my webstore or accessing it at any time I need to. Knowing that they have such a good uptime, it makes me feel comfortable that my customers can access things anytime, but also keep sales going 24/7
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.
I have not had any issues with pages loading slow or any real other issues, not that I have encountered so far. Speed of the site and images loading are fantastic and everything just seems to work nicely, which may seem like a simple thing to say about things, but when something just WORKS! Its rather nice vs fighting with things to work right.
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
Because they are always there no matter how simple or complex the question is, if they don't know the answer they don't fake it and just make you go away feeling frustrated.. they get you to someone that does know the answer. I always appreciate their help and their honesty!
They have a comprehensive online help file system that makes it easy to do almost anything. They cover just about everything you'd want to do with your online store with images, clear descriptions and in some cases video. I will, however, say the videos should be a little more professorially done and not sound like the employees are doing it in their cubical.
A certified BigCommerce design and solution partner will usually comprise a team of highly experienced designers, developers and marketers. It is our view that in the vast majority of cases, this will pay dividends in the long-term - especially for those teams that could use the extra support.
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
BigCommerce even with add-ons such as a PIM and B2B functionality wins for small businesses on affordability and ease of use. No servers or updates to worry about and no expensive agencies to pay. This being said, if the budget were no issue, for larger organisations Magento is perhaps a better option.
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
I believe after seeing all of the parts of this platform, one is able to develop the business and keep adding on select features for the business. There are multiple options for purchase with the various platforms once the business grows more. The different features being offered by the platform can lead us to scalability.
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.
Provides a robust platform to sell a high-risk product.
Page Builder saves you time and money by negating the need to buy a template.
Includes robust promotion settings that allow for codes and automatic discounts, bulk discounts, and customer groups (i.e. military discount), all native options.
