Apache Solr vs. IBM Watson Content Analytics

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

IBM Content Analytics is well suited for organizations with the resources to invest a significant amount of energy in an advanced analytics engine. The software improved the productivity of analysts and programmers. The software is not suitable for companies that just want Excel-type analyses or that lack the capabilities of doing advanced analytics.

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

• Impressive and efficient indexing system.
• Rarely does the indexing have issues that need to rebuild/reindex.
• Searches are almost instantaneous and end users can move on to the next task.

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.

• It would be better if its available for cross platforms.
• Pricing could be adjusted better.
• More number of third party add-ons required.

Incentivized

Apache Solr is a ready-to-use product addressing specific use cases such as keyword searches from a huge set of data documents.

Incentivized

Perhaps the biggest advantage of IBM Watson Content Analytics is the IBM feel. I think IBM puts lots of resources into developing products that even sociologists can use. It's so easy, that to professionals wanting customized analysis, it might be kind of offensive. The drawback is that Content Analytics is not as fast as its competitors.

Incentivized

• Improved response time in e-commerce websites.
• Developer's job is easier with Apache Solr in use.
• Customization in filtering and sorting is possible.

Incentivized

• Organized, easy to produce search results.
• Never lose a document again.

Incentivized