Azure AI Search vs. Inbenta Enterprise Search

Incredibly robust software for an enterprise organization to plug into their application. If you have a full development resource team at your disposal, this is great software and I highly recommend it. Largely, however, you won't be able to use this prior to the enterprise level. It's just too complicated and cumbersome of a product.

Incentivized

If you are looking for an enterprise search platform that offers an easy to use interface and if high performance is not really your priority, then I believe Inbenta Enterprise Search would fit your use case. For most other situations, I would recommend using a tried and tested search platform like Apache Solr.

Incentivized

• Azure Search provides a fully-managed service for loading, indexing, and querying content.
• Azure Search has an easy C# SDK that allows you to implement loading and retrieving data from the service very easy. Any developer with some Microsoft experience should feel immediate familiarity.
• Azure Search has a robust set of abilities around slicing and presenting the data during a search, such as narrowing by geospatial data and providing an auto-complete capabilities via "Suggesters".
• Azure Search has one-of-a-kind "Cognitive Search" capabilities that enable running AI algorithms over data to enrich it before it is stored into the service. For example, one could automatically do a sentiment analysis when ingesting the data and store that as one of the searchable fields on the content.

Incentivized

• Fairly easy to use interface.
• Quick to onboard new users, both in terms of access as well as training.
• The NLP-based semantic search feature is quite impressive.

Incentivized

• It's an enterprise level product so you need to have the budget for it.
• Challenging-to-impossible for a non-technical administrator to implement.
• It further locks you into Microsoft's ecosystem and doesn't play well with non-Microsoft software. Depending on your point of view, this can be a pro or a con.

Incentivized

• It is a fairly new tool in the market, so not much market feedback exists for this. This made us apprehensive in using it.
• The documentation and online forums are bare minimum.
• Quite buggy when working with multiple sources.

Incentivized

As I've mentioned, the biggest competitor to Azure Search is actually Azure SQL Database. It doesn't have as many features, but it's more economical and most .Net applications will have one already. As long as you can arrive at a schema and ranking strategy, it's a "good enough" solution. There are a variety of search technologies (Lucene, Solr, Elasticsearch) that implement a search service. Some of them are even open source, though I would only say "free" if you do not value your time. They most likely need to be hosted via Container (or VM if you're old school), so you're incurring DevOps costs to not only set them up but monitor and maintain them yourself.

If you're already on AWS, there is almost no reason to use Azure Search. Unless you're already multi-cloud, desperately need the cognitive abilities, and don't mind a potential performance hit from looking across datacenters (hey, it could happen), you should probably just use Amazon CloudSearch.

Incentivized

Apache Solr to Inbenta is like Java to Python. Apache Solr is powerful and handles complex search platforms well. Inbenta, on the other hand, is meant to be easy to use and does not lay too much emphasis on performance. If you are a small or medium business, Inbenta may suit your needs better. However, if you wish to manage a large and complex search platform, Solr is the way to go.

Incentivized

• Our internal market research illustrates that users are finding their desired information faster on account of autosuggest.
• Time spent on checkout page (for conversions) is significantly decreased.
• Clicks required on checkout page (for conversions) is significantly decreased.

Incentivized

• Enabled our developers to quickly deploy changes to the search model.
• NLP-powered semantic search feedback provides good actionable insights.

Incentivized