Algolia vs. IBM Watson Discovery

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
IBM Watson Discovery
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
IBM offers Watson Discovery, a natural language processing (NLP) application with options to measure sentiment, detect entities, semantic roles, and other concepts.N/A
Pricing
AlgoliaIBM Watson Discovery
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
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AlgoliaIBM Watson Discovery
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesYes
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional DetailsPay as you go, scale instantly, or upgrade anytime for advanced features and capabilities.
More Pricing Information
Best Alternatives
AlgoliaIBM Watson Discovery
Small Businesses
Yext
Yext
Score 8.9 out of 10
Yext
Yext
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Guru
Guru
Score 9.3 out of 10
Guru
Guru
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
Guru
Guru
Score 9.3 out of 10
Guru
Guru
Score 9.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AlgoliaIBM Watson Discovery
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(46 ratings)
9.3
(26 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(4 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Usability
6.0
(1 ratings)
8.6
(3 ratings)
Availability
9.6
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.4
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.4
(3 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.4
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
AlgoliaIBM Watson Discovery
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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IBM
Companies with a strong IT foundation looking for data-driven insights and efficient data analysis tools should give IBM Watson Discovery top consideration. It is a great instrument for making decisions, combining several data sources and offering insights motivated by artificial intelligence. Also, its personalizing tools let us maximize models for our specific study requirements.
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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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IBM
  • Searching through big collections of documents has never been easier thanks to Discovery's ability to identify, classify, profile, tag, and even split documents to allow for optimized search results.
  • IBM Watson Discovery is by far the go-to tool for mining data collections and getting deeper insights, thanks to the recent release of the Data Miner feature and its amazing graphic interface.
  • Another thing Discovery does well is the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Smart Document Understanding (SDU) features to train and learn the structures of documents which makes it super easy to find and highlight answers to complex questions.
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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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IBM
  • I believe AI should be more flexible about providing data. However, it's understandable that you need to provide the details you need in a more specific and detailed way.
  • The interface could use more tweaking. Being new to the program, it was kind of hard to navigate.
  • Luckily, there was a customized feature of the dashboard that I could set up, and having something that you know where you are placed always feels familiar and comfortable.
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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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IBM
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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IBM
IBM Watson Discovery has the best user capabilities and easily transform business decision-making portfolio. The automation system saves time used in data analysis as opposed to manual research that consumes a lot of time. The visualization across the dashboard enables my team to interpret complex data and use it to make reliable marketing decisions.
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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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IBM
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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IBM
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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IBM
Similar to all IBM Watson and Salesforce product solutions, the overall support would be a 10/10. Their provided FAQ's help with frequently experienced issues and if still unable to figure something out, their customer service representatives are always super responsive. With instant chat functions available, it is easy to ask a quick question rather than sitting on hold.
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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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IBM
Discovery differs from its competitors due to the better ease of implementation and the high level of natural language recognition, it is equal in integration resources such as API and workflow or process pipeline, but it loses in the price for a high volume of documents and/or research. If you own or plan to use other services from the IBM Watson family, there is no doubt that Watson discovery is your best option. Another important point is if you plan to use a cloud or on-premise service (local server or private cloud).
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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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IBM
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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IBM
  • We find its Enterprise plan expensive for a country of LATAM. For US or Europe based businesses, looks great.
  • A Big Data and massive queries based company would find the service expensive. Maybe a flat price plan would be helpful.
  • Have you thought in making a cheaper plan where you take the learning from your customer's data to enrich your AI tool?
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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.