Algolia vs. Experro

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

Here's why I wholeheartedly recommend Experro to any Ecommerce/Retail business AI- Powered Search: Experro takes the guesswork out of online shopping. It corrects typos and suggests the most common and popular search words for my customers type. This ensured that my customer found what they want faster, eliminating frustration and streamlining the shopping journey. Continuous Learning for Unmatched Personalization: Experro is not static; it's constantly learning from customers' interactions. With each search, click, and purchase, Experro fine-tuned its recommendations to match my customers' preferences and intent. My shoppers now feel like I have tailored the entire shopping experience just for them. Segment-Based Results: Not all customers are the same, and Experro understands this. It can re-rank products or provide entirely different search results for the same query based on customer segments like geography or demographics. This means results are more personalized and optimized for higher conversions. In conclusion, Experro is a game-changer in the world of Ecommerce. It doesn't just provide a platform for shoppers; it provides an experience. With its real-time learning, segment-based results, and actionable insights, Experro helped me to stand out in the competitive online marketplace. If you want to offer your customers a shopping experience like no other, I strongly recommend giving Experro a try.

• 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

• The ability of Experro CMS to update content quickly and independently is a significant advantage. Whether it's a feature launch or new promotional content, we’re ready to go live in no time!
• The platform offers an intuitive and user-friendly editing experience, making it accessible to individuals of all skill levels.

• 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

• There are endless possibilities that you can configure with Experro, but it would be good to have hands-on tutorials tailored to specific use cases.

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

When it's all so good,what's the reason to not renew it? ;)

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

The ease of use is top-notch! Honestly, the platform is intuitive. Whether it i uploading new content or managing the digital assets of a landing page - we got the hang of it pretty quickly.

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

We had contacted the support team to solve our doubts about the theme integration. The team was quick. Apparently they are available 24x5, it is pretty much enough to cover all our needs in the real-time.

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

In my opinion, setting up Experro is much easier compare to Bloomreach and we also didn't have to integrate with whole lot of tools to get the end results. Also, Experro is DXP with a combination of multiple tools like Headless CMS, Search, Merchandising, etc. giving us all the tools at a single place to play around without spending on integrations.

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

• Allowed our content managers to edit and publish content at 5x the speed
• Added over 2000 new keywords to our portfolio