Apache Solr is an open-source enterprise search server.
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Yext
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Yext is a digital experience software provider headquartered in New York, New York.
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Pricing
Apache Solr
Yext
Editions & Modules
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Pricing Offerings
Apache Solr
Yext
Free Trial
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Yes
Free/Freemium Version
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No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
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The cost of Yext varies depending on a number of factors such as package type, business size, entity count, and more. To create a solution that fits your business goals, please contact us or request a demo.
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.
Yext is great for bigger clients. If your client has a franchise of any kind, or even multiple locations, that's an ideal use case. For smaller clients, with one location that doesn't change a lot, Yext isn't as viable, and the effort to update maybe ten or fifteen listings would be worth it.
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.
Yext provides information within the portal on how you can enhance your listings as well as how you can fix any issues with your listings that may exist.
Yext's dedicated account managers can help you with any issues that may arise. For example our location pin on Apple Maps was wrong on one of our clinic listings and our Yext account manager reached out directly to Apple support and fixed the issue.
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.
Cost. This platform offers a lot of powerful features, but it has an expensive barrier to entry.
Annual contracts limit flexibility for smaller companies
The biggest drawback is that you need to keep your subscription active or listings/citation data will revert back to what it was pre-Yext implementation
Have been very impressed with the support we receive from Yext. I always feel I am listened to and if I have any problems or concerns they are quickly addressed. I have multiple ways to obtain support, either technical or strategic support, and they are responsive. I couldn't ask for more.
We use Yext and all the other products mentioned here. Yext overlaps a bit with BrightLocal, but BrightLocal acknowledges Yext and thus makes it easy to avoid duplicated work. Each service provides a unique service that we use with our clients. We have been with Yext since its early days and at that time, they were a direct tool to manage a client's online footprint. Yext continues to upgrade its services providing new ways to help clients.
Yext has absolutely strengthened our SEO performance and has driven leads that perform extremely well.
Yext has improved our consultation show rate because all of the clinic information for each of our locations is accurate no matter which website our clients are using to search for the clinic info.
Yext has allowed our organization to ensure the correct phone numbers are listed across the web, which increased the number of inbound leads that come into our Call Center.
