Algolia vs. Google Content Experiments (discontinued)

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.

Incentivized

Do you already have Google Analytics? If so content experiments is a good, free, starting point to dip your toes in A/B testing. Do you need to run Multivariate experiments? If so, Google Content Experiments is not going to fit your needs.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Quick and easy to create and set up experiments
• Results are presented in a way that is familiar and easy for any Google Analytics user to understand. So is great for beginners to conversion testing
• Already integrated into Google Analytics and can measure results against your existing conversion goals
• Allows nine possible variants to be A/B tested
• Features more than one testing methodology, Bayesian (Multi-Armed Bandit,) and Full Factorial
• Allows the user to select one of three possible confidence thresholds to ensure that experiment results are robust
• Great value, it is free!

• 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

• Their documentation is not the best and it's quite a steep learning curve.
• They also don't tell you particularly well what sorts of things you should be testing.
• Compared to other suppliers of A/B testing tools- it needs a simpler interface. Optimize is starting to answer that - but is still quite Beta-like.

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

Content Experiments just makes it is simple and easy to implement A|B tests. We will be evaluating other tools in search of a more robust system for multivariate and cross-page testing, such as Optimizely or Visual Website Optimizer. However, for basic testing, you can't really beat 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

Having used Algolia for over 5 years we have experienced zero downtime. I'd say that's pretty good.

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

Using the free tool, overall "live support" is limited. However, there are plenty of online resources to get started. If you need handheld support, it is best to upgrade the service or hire a developer through one of Google's partner agencies. There could be more support for understanding what makes a test useful or not.

Incentivized

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

Google Website Optimizer was a better product but has been discontinued. We have also used Test and Target , which has more features but we have been doing fine with Google Content Experiments. Most testing situations can be handled with Google Content Experiments.

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

• CE has made efficient time use easy and fool-proof when it comes to learning the software
• Because it integrates with other Google programs there is a benefit to track with Google Analytics
• The learning curve can create initiate time investment that may go beyond what companies are willing to dedicate.