Likelihood to Recommend Solr spins up nicely and works effectively for small enterprise environments providing helpful mechanisms for fuzzy searches and facetted searching. For larger enterprises with complex business solutions you'll find the need to hire an expert Solr engineer to optimize the powerful platform to your needs. Internationalization is tricky with Solr and many hosting solutions may limit you to a latin character set.
Read full review Coveo Relevance Cloud is a great solution to implement into Salesforce to provide Knowledge-Centered Support, Enhancements to a Customer Community, to provide sales aids, or to complement your customized app in Salesforce.
Read full review Pros Easy to get started with Apache Solr. Whether it is tackling a setup issue or trying to learn some of the more advanced features, there are plenty of resources to help you out and get you going. Performance. Apache Solr allows for a lot of custom tuning (if needed) and provides great out of the box performance for searching on large data sets. Maintenance. After setting up Solr in a production environment there are plenty of tools provided to help you maintain and update your application. Apache Solr comes with great fault tolerance built in and has proven to be very reliable. Read full review Coveo is fast, search results come up quick (though it's not always great). Not much complexity to run. Coveo is implemented within our portal and doesn't require extra steps to use it. Read full review Cons These examples are due to the way we use Apache Solr. I think we have had the same problems with other NoSQL databases (but perhaps not the same solution). High data volumes of data and a lot of users were the causes. We have lot of classifications and lot of data for each classification. This gave us several problems: First: We couldn't keep all our data in Solr. Then we have all data in our MySQL DB and searching data in Solr. So we need to be sure to update and match the 2 databases in the same time. Second: We needed several load balanced Solr databases. Third: We needed to update all the databases and keep old data status. If I don't speak about problems due to our lack of experience, the main Solr problem came from frequency of updates vs validation of several database. We encountered several locks due to this (our ops team didn't want to use real clustering, so all DB weren't updated). Problem messages were not always clear and we several days to understand the problems. Read full review It would be great if Coveo 6 allowed you to rebuild indexes from a certain subtree instead of needing to rebuild the entire tree to see changes. This functionality was added in Coveo 7 and is very useful. In Coveo 6, integration with Sitecore is more difficult than one would expect. This integration is much improved in Coveo 7. I have seen cases where an exception thrown when crawling a specific document will cause the indexing to stop completely. I believe this only happens in implementations using custom faceting but it could be handled more efficiently if the trouble document was skipped and the indexing could continue. Relevancy ranking editor is good but not as powerful as GSA. GSA offers a self-learning scorer which automatically analyzes user behavior and the specific links that users click on for specific queries to fine tune relevance and scoring. We've ran into issues on multiple clients with Sitecore items being indexed multiple times in Sitecore 7 and Coveo 7. The fix Coveo suggested was to upgrade our Sitecore version and Coveo but unfortunately this didn't resolve our issue. After months of testing we were finally able to resolve this by implementing our own CoveoItemCrawler to get around the issue (based on https://developers.coveo.com/display/public/SC201404/Items+in+the+Same+Language+Gets+Indexed+Multiple+Times;jsessionid=3C1A2AE33540E0A0B8BB52BA3A64AF70). Integration with RabbitMQ in Coveo 7 seems error prone. We often see the error "The AMQP operation was interrupted" and on occasion, need to restart the Coveo service to get this operating again. In some extreme cases, we have also had to restart the server because of issues when attempting to restart the Coveo service. Read full review Likelihood to Renew This question is not applicable to me
Read full review Alternatives Considered Apache Solr is a ready-to-use product addressing specific use cases such as keyword searches from a huge set of data documents.
Read full review Return on Investment Improved response time in e-commerce websites. Developer's job is easier with Apache Solr in use. Customization in filtering and sorting is possible. Read full review Quick to find things in a massive database when needed. Results need to be more concise - sometimes we spend more time looking for the right file than if we were to just search amongst our own networks instead. Coveo is not always the most useful but does its job when general information is needed. Read full review ScreenShots