Algolia vs. Bloomreach Commerce Experience Cloud

If you have a dedicated developer who has the technical know-how to delve deep into Algolia's documentation to figure out what makes it tick, this is the product for you. Algolia's framework is extremely powerful, making search instantaneous and providing users with results at break-neck speeds. If all you need is great search, but you do not require a complex relevancy algorithm running it, Algolia will work well for you. The more complex your use case, the more expensive the product becomes.

Incentivized

As a manager at an entertainment platform, Sonora helps us maintain a consistent communication flow with our end user. It allows this communication to be automated which helps our team focus on what's important - making sure the creatives of the communications are well suited for their objective and ideating new scenarios for communication.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• All in one. We have experience working with other CDP/Marketing suites and it is really difficult to connect their different modules. Bloomreach Engagement has been built to be a single product which makes everything easy to use
• Fast and real-time. Other platforms struggle with getting real-time volumes or segmenting based on real-time events, that is not the case with Bloomreach Engagement
• GCP partnership. Being deployed over GCP and having BigQuery as raw data export makes really easy to expand and connect with existing stacks

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• While Importing the offline data, sometimes the auto detection is failed to detect the csv file
• While we import with wrong mapping, even after pressing escape before the import starts, its not cancelling the import. it start running. It would be great if it stops the import
• it would be great if we receive email for successfully finished imports too

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

So far, Hippo is our ideal tool given its use of open standards which helps us to have a clear overview of what's coming next in the future Hippo releases. We are very confident in the future-readiness of the product

In my time working with Bloomreach Commerce Experience Cloud, I always liked to work with it. It is crucial that you get support from experts from the beginning to show you how to work with the vast amount of options and activities to choose from. The learning curve is also well-rounded because of its user-friendly interface and highly skilled customer support.

Incentivized

99% of the time the site is available for when we need to use. With any cloud based software there will be occasion that there is an outage but this is communicated effectively and dealt with quickly. This has never got in the way of what we need to do in our day to day work and wouldn't be thought of as a problem

Incentivized

The search API is very fast (150ms), even considering we have nearly 2 million products in our catalog. The console pages where you do your configuration, add ranking rules and synonyms are sometimes a bit slower to load, but your customer would not notice any of that. The reports pages are also not the fastest, but definitely okay

Incentivized

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

Communication with the Bloomreach support team is very easy and they have always taken prompt action to help us with anything. The support team is also very helpful on explaining how and why things should be done in a certain way and why it's not possible to set or executive integrations in a different way than the recommended.

Incentivized

The team was really helpful in explaining

Incentivized

It gives clear overview in each and every concepts

Incentivized

None it went smoothly

Incentivized

Elasticsearch is its direct competitor, but I would say that it is more focused on performance and less focused on aesthetics and recommendations. If you are thinking of getting Algolia, I would recommend that you also compare it at least to Elasticsearch. Either one is a good upgrade from "out of the box" search tools.

Incentivized

Bloomreach makes a marketer much more self sufficient than Hubspot does. When using Hubspot I was reliant on data professionals providing me with large excel sheets containing all variables used in an email. Bloomreach connects with our data warehouse and as a marketer I can use all this data to create the right segmentations and use the right variables in my email campaigns.

Incentivized

Easy to use, very clear guides and instructions and available support. Omni channel marketings, everything is in one place. Better Understand and Activate Your Customers. It allows us to create personalized, real-time marketing campaigns that will drive real results. Get your hands on your customer data, then use that data to engage these customers with relevant and consistent messaging across all channels, at scale.

Incentivized

• Algolia is very fast but also very expensive. However, the size of our organization is very huge, so cost is not much of a problem.
• Algolia does not support iPhone and Android. This is a major issue, which is why we were considering moving to swiftype.
• Since it has integration issues, we could not fully leverage the software.

Incentivized

• Emails, banners, and weblayers brought us an increase in conversion and additional profit.
• From a marketers perspective, it allows us to reach far and wide and see how well a campaign is doing in real-time.
• Knowing the customer allows improved communication and personalize our recommendations.
• Bloomreach Engagement has created revenue uplift with acquisition and conversion.
• The most effective tool out there when ROI is in question.