Algolia vs. Sitecore Discover

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
Sitecore Discover
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Sitecore Discover, formerly Reflektion, is a customer centric personalization platform that optimizes customer experiences on an individual basis in real time.N/A
Pricing
AlgoliaSitecore Discover
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
AlgoliaSitecore Discover
Free Trial
NoYes
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
Best Alternatives
AlgoliaSitecore Discover
Small Businesses
Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch
Score 8.4 out of 10
Kameleoon
Kameleoon
Score 9.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Guru
Guru
Score 9.0 out of 10
Kameleoon
Kameleoon
Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises
Guru
Guru
Score 9.0 out of 10
Kameleoon
Kameleoon
Score 9.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AlgoliaSitecore Discover
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(44 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.7
(4 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
5.8
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.4
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
AlgoliaSitecore Discover
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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Sitecore
Reflektion is very well suited for ecommerce sites that are looking to provide their customers meaningful product recommendations tailored to their specific user experience on our site. We are also beginning to use Reflektion for search results. If you find that your customer base uses your search bar or is having issues with their search experience, Reflektion offers a great auto complete search results feature. We have a sister site that only offers a small catalog of products and we do no use the auto search results feature on this site. If your company has a small catalog the search results tool may not be as effective. I cannot think of a scenario in which an ecommerce site would not find it helpful to provide customized product recommendations to their customers.
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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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Sitecore
  • Reflektion provides individualized results based off each customer's unique browse experience on the site. This is beneficial because it gets more accurate results than segmenting customers by certain behaviors consistent with other customers.
  • Reflektion is responsive to our business. They treat each request with professionalism and work to find solutions quickly.
  • Reflektion has several beneficial features to further enhance the customer experience through a learning environment. Reflektion learns synonyms and is able to adjust for more accurate results. They also provide full page results with faceted navigation which leverages the individualized learning into the product results specific for each customer in a seamless integration with the site.
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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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Sitecore
  • While I mentioned that training our team in using the Reflektion dashboard was quite pain free, the dashboard can get a little overwhelming to a first time user. There are a lot of options and customization features available that can be intimidating at first.
  • There isn't really too much for us to criticize with Reflektion. As I said, we switched from another product to Reflektion and so far have had almost no issues. When they do come up, the Reflektion team has been very helpful.
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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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Sitecore
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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Sitecore
No answers on this topic
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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Sitecore
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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Sitecore
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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Sitecore
No answers on this topic
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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Sitecore
Reflektion is a very cost-effective, complete solution providing individualization for preview search, product recommendations, full page search, and content. Compared to the other services they offered more features utilizing SOLR results but with continued learning. Other services didn't have the full list of capabilities or were much more expensive.
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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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Sitecore
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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Sitecore
  • Increasing conversion rate is almost always the goal when we start a new project and it is safe to say that Reflektion has helped us increase conversion rate for customers clicking through product recommendations.
  • With our previous recommendations engine, tweaking and customizing the recommendations on our site was not nearly as effective or easy as it is with Reflektion. This has saved us countless hours in dev and manual operations work.
  • We have not seen any negative impacts of Reflektion and hope this continues.
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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.

Sitecore Discover Screenshots

Screenshot of Screenshot of Product MerchandisingScreenshot of Instant Visual Search