Algolia in San Francisco, California offers enterprise search as a service.
$0
per month 10,000 search requests + 1 Million records
Shopify Plus
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Shopify Plus is an eCommerce solution built for enterprise-level companies that enables them to sell online and offline across social channels like Facebook , Pinterest, and marketplaces like Amazon and eBay.
$2,300
per month
Pricing
Algolia
Shopify Plus
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
3-year term
$2300
per month
1-year term
$2500
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Algolia
Shopify Plus
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
Pay as you go, scale instantly, or upgrade anytime for advanced features and capabilities.
Elasticsearch is its direct competitor, but I would say that it is more focused on performance and less focused on aesthetics and recommendations. If you are thinking of getting Algolia, I would recommend that you also compare it at least to Elasticsearch. Either one is a good …
Algolia works well in tandem with Magento and provides a large number of tools and features that provide greater control and adaptability as compared to other solutions we reviewed. Algolia has demonstrated its commitment to continual innovation, providing access to next-gen …
We selected Algolia because it was ridiculously fast and we liked the direction the company was going. We also did not want to deal with a self hosted solution like Solr.
Shopify Plus is way ahead of the pack in terms of features, automated and worry free maintenance / security / scaling / infrastructure, customer support, and speed. We've been building eCommerce sites for over a decade and it seems almost every positive trend in eCommerce is …
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.
Any business that needs to keep track of orders and payments would benefit from Shopify Plus. Customers information, orders, and payments are all saved and available for reference. You are able to refer to past orders to review trends and offer future purchase suggestions. Shopify Plus is also easy to use so it does not take long to train employees how to use this system.
Scales incredibly well. Forget about hardware concerns, load balancing, downtime, etc. and focus on eCommerce. We've seen merchants go from a few thousand dollars per month to having million dollar days, all on Shopify without having to worry about performance or scaling systems.
Great new features consistently being added, ahead of the curve on almost everything
Solid API to build on and work with, a few annoying quirks here and there for super complex use cases but overall very well documented and works well
Most Merchant Success Managers are good and genuinely want to be helpful
A fantastic user interface, very logical and easy to use
Tons and tons and tons of out of the box integrations. Easily the best integration marketplace of the e-commerce platforms. There's an app for that.
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.
The Account Managers/Reps have become more scripted and seem like they are busier and handling more clients than before. It doesn't seem as personal and special anymore like when we first upgraded to Plus.
Shopify still has missing features in their software that might not have an app in their app marketplace available that fills this void.
The 24/7 support doesn't seem as dedicated as they once were.
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.
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
It just works! It is so prolific worldwide that there are a plethora of partners who can support you. Development time is cut in half as many plugins can be used that would require custom development on other platforms. It is stable, fast, and scalable.
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.
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
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.
Shopify had the quickest go-to-market and most robust API among the products we compared. CommerceCloud required a VERY LONG integration phase that we just didn't have time for. BigCommerce fell short on the number of features and API coverage that we needed. Overall Shopify gave us the most bang for the buck.
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
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.
