Likelihood to Recommend Apache Lucene is a perfect text search implementation where the heap space usage needs to be kept to its minimal. It also enables search based on various search fields and most importantly the search and index process can happen simultaneously. The only scenario where it might be less appropriate would be when the index size grows too big. We have witnessed few scalable issues where the search would take a while when the index size is too large.
Sirish Vadala Applications Developer Information Technology Specialist
Read full review The Watson Explorer is great because it potentially replaces a meriad of other low-level analytics products that we would need to use for data analytics and data mining. WEX isn't really suitable much beyond doing text and data analytics and performing machine learning, so if your team doesn't really have a use-case that fits all of these categories, it is worth looking at an alternative.
Read full review Pros We found Apache Lucene to be extremely performant in querying large amounts of data and retrieving the correct files based on the metadata provided. The online community offers great support for the product. Even though it is an open source tool, it is not difficult to find help online for it. When we were creating a proof of concept application, we found that the software worked just as well, while being run locally on a resource-limited PC. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons User interface for setup and maintenance would be helpful. Easier cloud/cluster setup. Better, centralized documentation. Read full review 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. Read full review Alternatives Considered The search and index performance of [Apache] Lucene is excellent and the quality of results is good, if not better. For implementing it with small scale applications it is a no brainer, Lucene is the best and most cost effective solution. Learning curve is not too steep either.
Sirish Vadala Applications Developer Information Technology Specialist
Read full review Google Cloud offers a Natural Language product, but it is just an API. This API doesn't offer the useful visualizations of relations, analytics, and graphs that IBM Watson Explorer offers on their interface. For this reason, we chose to go with IBM WEX. For later stages of our production, we decided to use Google's NLP API because we found that it was quick to integrate into production after studying data and developing models using IBM WEX.
Read full review Return on Investment Being an open source project we did not have to pay any licensing fees for using Apache Lucene. It has greatly improved our search functionality in our web apps. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots Apache Lucene Screenshots