Algolia vs. Coveo Relevance Cloud

I'd definitely recommend Algolia for a business operating in the ecommerce space and looking to integrate search quickly. Using the tool is easy to set up and works well. Out of the box you can have search, autocomplete, and recommendations that are all integrated. If you integrate directly, Algolia works well for also using their internal A/B test system. Areas where Algolia can be harder to use are in user-generated marketplaces. On a site where you control / own / produce all your inventory of results, you are solely optimizing for revenue/conversion. When you have a platform where there are different creators for each item, you need to balance revenue optimization with trying to support the business goals of the sellers on your marketplace platform. Algolia offers less tooling there which can be difficult and will require you build additional tooling/monitoring for that. Given that need, you likely cannot use all of Algolia's UI tools like A/B testing.

Incentivized

Coveo Relevance Cloud is a great solution to implement into Salesforce to provide Knowledge-Centered Support, Enhancements to a Customer Community, to provide sales aids, or to complement your customized app in Salesforce.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Coveo is fast, search results come up quick (though it's not always great).
• Not much complexity to run.
• Coveo is implemented within our portal and doesn't require extra steps to use it.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It would be great if Coveo 6 allowed you to rebuild indexes from a certain subtree instead of needing to rebuild the entire tree to see changes. This functionality was added in Coveo 7 and is very useful.
• In Coveo 6, integration with Sitecore is more difficult than one would expect. This integration is much improved in Coveo 7.
• I have seen cases where an exception thrown when crawling a specific document will cause the indexing to stop completely. I believe this only happens in implementations using custom faceting but it could be handled more efficiently if the trouble document was skipped and the indexing could continue.
• Relevancy ranking editor is good but not as powerful as GSA. GSA offers a self-learning scorer which automatically analyzes user behavior and the specific links that users click on for specific queries to fine tune relevance and scoring.
• We've ran into issues on multiple clients with Sitecore items being indexed multiple times in Sitecore 7 and Coveo 7. The fix Coveo suggested was to upgrade our Sitecore version and Coveo but unfortunately this didn't resolve our issue. After months of testing we were finally able to resolve this by implementing our own CoveoItemCrawler to get around the issue (based on https://developers.coveo.com/display/public/SC201404/Items+in+the+Same+Language+Gets+Indexed+Multiple+Times;jsessionid=3C1A2AE33540E0A0B8BB52BA3A64AF70).
• Integration with RabbitMQ in Coveo 7 seems error prone. We often see the error "The AMQP operation was interrupted" and on occasion, need to restart the Coveo service to get this operating again. In some extreme cases, we have also had to restart the server because of issues when attempting to restart the Coveo service.

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

This question is not applicable to me

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

100% uptime for as much as we were aware :P

Incentivized

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.

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

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Quick to find things in a massive database when needed.
• Results need to be more concise - sometimes we spend more time looking for the right file than if we were to just search amongst our own networks instead.
• Coveo is not always the most useful but does its job when general information is needed.

Incentivized