Algolia vs IBM Watson Explorer

• Algolia is brain-dead simple to set up. I've implemented search with Algolia in a dozen different ways now, and it never took me longer than a few minutes to get the functionality I want. With Algolia, the only challenge is designing your search UI -- if you don't want to use their baked in UI solutions.
• Results come back incredibly fast. I'm not sure how Algolia does it, but every keystroke I make in a search field returns new results instantly. It's hard to believe that I'm searching large datasets on a remote server when it works so fast.
• Very little customization is needed for 99% of use-cases. Algolia's out of the box setup works great, and it takes no prior knowledge to set up.

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• Free to try - It's possible to use most of the useful features of Watson Explore on their trial/demo accounts.
• Super well-designed data analytics tool - Most of the tools and features of the explorer are really useful, and truly help you fully understand the depth of any format of textual data.
• Extensive sources compatibility - WEX can retrieve data from a large range of sources, and the compatibility there is quite good as well.

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• Algolia can be a bit complex -- for smaller companies or companies without many tech resources, it may be difficult to implement and use without the help of a third party
• Manually manipulating search results (for specific queries having listings show up first) is a bit difficult to do without custom developing that functionality

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• Support is just OK, like most of the other IBM Watson products. The setup/integration is really hands-on, but it's also problematic because support later may take a considerable amount of time.
• UI could still use a little more improvement - part of the administration and sources dashboards are hard to navigate.
• The Application Builder is a great part of the product, but hard to learn/understand - this is where we needed the most support from IBM and tutorials/documentation.

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• It's too early to measure any increase in our transactions
• We have good customer feedback on the Algolia search function
• We are looking at other apps in development where we can also leverage the power of Algolia

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• Positive - Trial/demo period. This was really useful for us to figure out what features of WEX we liked most and how difficult it would be to integrate WEX into our workflow.
• Negative - On-boarding was long and almost always requires support from IBM support, unlike most other products this advanced.
• Positive - WEX replaced a large selection of alternative products we would have to use for the same functionality, and having all of that function in one place was definitely helpful.

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