Apache Solr vs. Elasticsearch vs. SAP Commerce Cloud

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.

Incentivized

Elasticsearch is a really scalable solution that can fit a lot of needs, but the bigger and/or those needs become, the more understanding & infrastructure you will need for your instance to be running correctly. Elasticsearch is not problem-free - you can get yourself in a lot of trouble if you are not following good practices and/or if are not managing the cluster correctly. Licensing is a big decision point here as Elasticsearch is a middleware component - be sure to read the licensing agreement of the version you want to try before you commit to it. Same goes for long-term support - be sure to keep yourself in the know for this aspect you may end up stuck with an unpatched version for years.

Incentivized

SAP Commerce Cloud is well-suited for large enterprises requiring robust personalization, seamless multi-channel integration, and the ability to handle high-volume transactions, especially during peak periods like Black Friday. Its scalability and advanced features make it ideal for businesses needing to manage complex product catalogs and global operations.Enough development capacities are needed to have a best in class shop

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• As I mentioned before, Elasticsearch's flexible data model is unparalleled. You can nest fields as deeply as you want, have as many fields as you want, but whatever you want in those fields (as long as it stays the same type), and all of it will be searchable and you don't need to even declare a schema beforehand!
• Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, is super strong financially and they have a great team of devs and product managers working on Elasticsearch. When I first started using ES 3 years ago, I was 90% impressed and knew it would be a good fit. 3 years later, I am 200% impressed and blown away by how far it has come and gotten even better. If there are features that are missing or you don't think it's fast enough right now, I bet it'll be suitable next year because the team behind it is so dang fast!
• Elasticsearch is really, really stable. It takes a lot to bring down a cluster. It's self-balancing algorithms, leader-election system, self-healing properties are state of the art. We've never seen network failures or hard-drive corruption or CPU bugs bring down an ES cluster.

Incentivized

• Centralized Data Management: SAP Commerce Cloud excels in centralizing data from various operational sectors, which is pivotal in the chemicals industry. This feature allows for better oversight and management of complex supply chains, regulatory compliance, and customer interactions. Having a single source of truth for crucial business data minimizes discrepancies and promotes informed decision-making.
• Real-Time Data Processing: The real-time data processing capability of SAP Commerce Cloud is invaluable. It aids in timely adherence to regulatory changes and helps in meeting customer demands promptly. In a sector where regulations and market conditions are ever-evolving, real-time data processing is fundamental for maintaining compliance and ensuring customer satisfaction.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Joining data requires duplicate de-normalized documents that make parent child relationships. It is hard and requires a lot of synchronizations
• Tracking errors in the data in the logs can be hard, and sometimes recurring errors blow up the error logs
• Schema changes require complete reindexing of an index

Incentivized

• It's a little pricey; further cost reductions will expand product selection; also, trained operators are required.
• HAC occasionally functions extremely slowly and does not provide any problem messages; it simply gets stuck. Logging into the Backoffice for testing purposes causes a lot of trouble; it does not enable us to log in in one attempt, and the page refreshes every time we enter in the credentials.

Incentivized

We're pretty heavily invested in ElasticSearch at this point, and there aren't any obvious negatives that would make us reconsider this decision.

Incentivized

SAP Commerce and Spartacus together becomes one of the omnichannel powerhouse of commerce application. It also comes with edge advantage with out of the box integrations with many SAP applications and also non-SAP applciations which gives it edge advantage over other tools. The main reason being the integration becomes easier as SAP shares the common data schema and model across all its product line and new feature releases are compatible with all the SAP product line.

Incentivized

It takes some time to deploy and currectly maintein it. And also, to learn how to use and integrate in the enviroment as well. Once you get theses steps done, it usability is very simple, and almost of the time it don't require no further attention on it. Even for maintence, if you deploy it on a cluster mode, it is very reliable and easy to take one host down.

Incentivized

To get started with Elasticsearch, you don't have to get very involved in configuring what really is an incredibly complex system under the hood. You simply install the package, run the service, and you're immediately able to begin using it. You don't need to learn any sort of query language to add data to Elasticsearch or perform some basic searching. If you're used to any sort of RESTful API, getting started with Elasticsearch is a breeze. If you've never interacted with a RESTful API directly, the journey may be a little more bumpy. Overall, though, it's incredibly simple to use for what it's doing under the covers.

Incentivized

More true headless and a more rationale pricing. Since moving from the Hzbris Monolyth towards SAP Commerce Cloud a lot of progress has been made, but dissecting the monolyth into composable components where you just pay for what you use is still a longer journey and here pricing should be more realistic. Things become so expensive once they have the SAP stamp on them (example the SAP CIAM)

Incentivized

We've only used it as an opensource tooling. We did not purchase any additional support to roll out the elasticsearch software. When rolling out the application on our platform we've used the documentation which was available online. During our test phases we did not experience any bugs or issues so we did not rely on support at all.

Incentivized

We have the right to open a ticket or submit request to SAP support teams for all the problems we have experienced. They also provide solutions for critical issues within 48 hours. In addition, the product has support documents such as a user guide and admin guide. In addition, there is a strong community of users. In this way, we can access solution of some specific problems that we have fallen on from there.

Incentivized

Do not mix data and master roles. Dedicate at least 3 nodes just for Master

Incentivized

Scalability of the product was good Seamless integrations were helped in reducing the implementation for the development team to integrate with the SAP ERP Product framework helped customer to customize and adapt the new features which were developed basis business processes and ease of customer experience. Deployment and creation of the build becomes very easy with the CCv2 setup.

Incentivized

We tried to use both Elasticsearch and Swiftype with Drupal 8 but there are currently no good modules that integrate Drupal with those solutions. So Solr was really the only option for a Drupal 8 web site. It's not as easy to learn or use as Swiftype, but in the end I think it will be a little less expensive and offer more customization and flexibility.

Incentivized

As far as we are concerned, Elasticsearch is the gold standard and we have barely evaluated any alternatives. You could consider it an alternative to a relational or NoSQL database, so in cases where those suffice, you don't need Elasticsearch. But if you want powerful text-based search capabilities across large data sets, Elasticsearch is the way to go.

Incentivized

SAP Cloud is much better than GoDaddy. it was a smooth transition and every aspect of the program is easier. My scalability increased greatly from GoDaddy to SAp Commerce Cloud and sales are now tracked easier and inventory is at the touch of a button, making sales much easier than previous software.

Incentivized

The business users/admins were able to quickly segment products by brand, allowing for unique branding and header-less page design. As new products are added to the SAP backend, all characteristics and pricing automatically migrate to Commerce Cloud. We also segment our user sign-on (domains) by brand and allow targeting displays.

Incentivized

• It has enabled my organization to find information faster by being a one-stop service to search across content that were indexed from varying sources.
• By using synonyms and usual lemmatizations / stemming, it enabled discovery of new content following every search.

Incentivized

• We have had great luck with implementing Elasticsearch for our search and analytics use cases.
• While the operational burden is not minimal, operating a cluster of servers, using a custom query language, writing Elasticsearch-specific bulk insert code, the performance and the relative operational ease of Elasticsearch are unparalleled.
• We've easily saved hundreds of thousands of dollars implementing Elasticsearch vs. RDBMS vs. other no-SQL solutions for our specific set of problems.

Incentivized

• It has a positive impact on my client's business and ROI is higher than expected. As orders count is increasing due to smooth and better experience.
• My current client's customers have given very positive experience about new website built on SAP Commerce Cloud.
• Due to SAP Commerce Cloud website rollout is very easy and due to it, my current client has introduced around 25 websites. As SAP Commerce Cloud logic needs to develop once and can be reused for multiple websites easily with minimal effort.
• Branding is also very easy as promotions, events can be implemented on the website easily and with minimum time.
• SAP Commerce has helped our client to integrate the Recommendation tool ISS which is easy to configure after this tool product sale is increased. The best thing was that integration was very easy and quick.
• One option of Blue/Green deployment helping us to check the production release in advance on production environment. Prev we don't have this option and many times face P1 issue in prod which had ruined client reputation. But now this feature is helping lot

Incentivized