Algolia vs. Elastic Enterprise Search

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Algolia
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Algolia in San Francisco, California offers enterprise search as a service.
$0
per month 10,000 search requests + 1 Million records
Elastic Enterprise Search
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
Elastic Enterprise Search Swiftype is a platform with modules for Site Search, App Search and Workplace Search, that boasts powering search for thousands of enterprises and websites. The services were developed by Swiftype and acquired by Elastic in late 2017. Powered by Elasticsearch, the vendor states Elastic Enterprise Search is fast, with proven, optimized relevance models designed for real-life, natural search.
$79
per month
Pricing
AlgoliaElastic Enterprise Search
Editions & Modules
Build
$0
per month Up to 10,000 search requests + 1 Million records
Grow
$0.50
per month per 1,000 search requests
Algolia Recommend
$0.60
per month per 1,000 Recommend requests
Premium
Custom
per month Customized pricing
Standard
$79
per month
Pro
$199
per month
Premium
Custom
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AlgoliaElastic Enterprise Search
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional DetailsPay as you go, scale instantly, or upgrade anytime for advanced features and capabilities.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AlgoliaElastic Enterprise Search
Considered Both Products
Algolia
Chose Algolia
Algolia at first seemed and proved to be the fastest compared to the other search engines. It is very easy to implement. Also, it had a 24x7 support which proved to be very useful. It is also useful for all types of clients weather it be organizations or individuals. It can …
Chose Algolia
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.
Elastic Enterprise Search
Chose Elastic Enterprise Search
We selected Swiftype compared to Google as it is very well designed and has a great layout. The technical support helps anytime we need them. They also provide great support. The analytics provided are also great and provide excellent features. It is easy to use and configure. …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
AlgoliaElastic Enterprise Search
Small Businesses
Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch
Score 8.4 out of 10
Algolia
Algolia
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Guru
Guru
Score 9.0 out of 10
Guru
Guru
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Guru
Guru
Score 9.0 out of 10
Guru
Guru
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AlgoliaElastic Enterprise Search
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(44 ratings)
8.1
(2 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.7
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
6.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
9.6
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.4
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
5.8
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.4
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
AlgoliaElastic Enterprise Search
Likelihood to Recommend
Algolia
Algolia offers a wide range of capabilities that can benefit any business by addressing their specific requirements. Integrating with this platform is seamless, and their extensive knowledgebase and training resources are highly valuable for both developers and UI users. We have already witnessed the advantages of this product and are eagerly anticipating future enhancements as we continue to expand our platform, with Algolia as our primary tool for enhancing our search experience.
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Elastic
Swiftype is excellent for e-commerce companies and especially the financial services sector where speed plays a major role in executing transactions. It is also very dynamic and customizable. It is very useful for electronics/travel reservations on e-commerce sites also. The only place it is inappropriate is when it comes to indexing a website in which case Google is slightly better, as I mentioned before. There is nothing much to complain about here in regards to the breadth of applications and analytics it offers.
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Pros
Algolia
  • Easy setup and configuration of fast search results across multiple types of object
  • Can be used to power sales pages, category headings, category product listings, help articles and more within the same search results
  • Managing synonyms, blocked words and other product requirements can be done without engineering support
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Elastic
  • It's very easy to implement. The documentation is great and you can be up and running very quickly.
  • It's easy to configure. The web-based user interface makes it super simple to configure (i.e. customize search rankings, edit synonyms, etc.).
  • Their support is very friendly and helpful. Whenever I had a question or couldn't figure something old, they were quick to help me out.
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Cons
Algolia
  • 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.
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Elastic
  • Swiftype does not have indexes ready to go. When you add a new website to the search set, it takes some time to index the website. This is something that is different from what Google does. Google in this particular aspect does a relatively better job.
  • Swiftype is very expensive, this makes it difficult for smaller companies to afford.
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Likelihood to Renew
Algolia
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.
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Elastic
No answers on this topic
Usability
Algolia
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
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Elastic
No answers on this topic
Reliability and Availability
Algolia
Having used Algolia for over 5 years we have experienced zero downtime. I'd say that's pretty good.
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Elastic
No answers on this topic
Performance
Algolia
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.
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Elastic
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Algolia
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
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Elastic
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Algolia
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.
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Elastic
Google Search Appliance is no longer supported. Apache Solr is a popular, free open source solution, but it lacks a web crawler and is more difficult to configure and maintain.
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Scalability
Algolia
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
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Elastic
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Algolia
  • 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.
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Elastic
  • It has a positive impact as it helps traders and other users to seamlessly use applications.
  • It has a positive ROI and we would know the results in time to come.
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ScreenShots

Algolia Screenshots

Screenshot of Index & Query Rules Management: Query Rules helps to enhance an engine's ranking behavior for specific queries. Setting up rules can uncover and enable users to respond more specifically to the intent behind users' queries.Screenshot of Query Monitoring: Offers insight into the status, performance and overall activity happening within the search engine.Screenshot of Algolia Analytics: The search bar is a feedback form. Algolia's analytics drives insights from search to click to conversion.Screenshot of Algolia Dashboard: Products to accelerate search and discovery experiences across any device and platform.Screenshot of Advanced front-end libraries, API clients, and extensive documentation to help developers build, deploy, and maintain.Screenshot of To get started users simply choose an index, denote the events, and choose a model.