Algolia vs. Elastic Enterprise Search

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Algolia
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
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
Elastic Enterprise Search
Score 6.2 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
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
$79
per month
Pro
$199
per month
Premium
Custom
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AlgoliaElastic Enterprise Search
Free Trial
YesYes
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. …
Best Alternatives
AlgoliaElastic Enterprise Search
Small Businesses
Yext
Yext
Score 7.9 out of 10
Yext
Yext
Score 7.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Guru
Guru
Score 9.4 out of 10
Guru
Guru
Score 9.4 out of 10
Enterprises
Guru
Guru
Score 9.4 out of 10
Guru
Guru
Score 9.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AlgoliaElastic Enterprise Search
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(55 ratings)
8.1
(2 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(6 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
8.8
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.4
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
AlgoliaElastic Enterprise Search
Likelihood to Recommend
Algolia
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.
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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
  • 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.
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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
  • 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)
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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 is very intuitive to use, especially the Merchandising Studio. The application provides a virtually seamless view of how product will appear on the frontend and making adjustments is fluid and reflects immediately online. Some slow-down occurs when you have a lot of rules enabled or are pinning / boosting a lot of product. But overall it functions very solidly.
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Elastic
No answers on this topic
Reliability and Availability
Algolia
100% uptime for as much as we were aware :P
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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
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
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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
Algolia has been a consistent product that works flawless with very few errors or downtime. With the plan options it’s very easy for us to scale especially with this usage pricing. We have 100% gotten our ROI on this product.
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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 help 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. This 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 the Algolia Dashboard, offering products to accelerate search and discovery experiences across any device and platform.Screenshot of the advanced front-end libraries, API clients, and extensive documentation that help developers build, deploy, and maintain.Screenshot of where users getting started simply choose an index, denote the events, and choose a model.