Azure AI Search vs. Island

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Azure AI Search
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Azure AI Search (formerly Azure Cognitive Search) is enterprise search as a service, from Microsoft.
$0.10
Per Hour
Island
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
Island is an Enterprise Browser platform. Island also gives organizations control, visibility, and governance over security and search.N/A
Pricing
Azure AI SearchIsland
Editions & Modules
Basic
$0.101
Per Hour
Standard S1
$0.336
Per Hour
Standard S2
$1.344
Per Hour
Standard S3
$2.688
Per Hour
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Azure AI SearchIsland
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Azure AI SearchIsland
Best Alternatives
Azure AI SearchIsland
Small Businesses
Yext
Yext
Score 8.9 out of 10
Yext
Yext
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Guru
Guru
Score 9.6 out of 10
Guru
Guru
Score 9.6 out of 10
Enterprises
Guru
Guru
Score 9.6 out of 10
Guru
Guru
Score 9.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Azure AI SearchIsland
Likelihood to Recommend
7.0
(3 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Azure AI SearchIsland
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
It's very useful when used with large file systems, once the models index the files good enough, the suggestions are very impressive and produce grounded answers. Since it can natively work with blob storage the requirement for pre-processing the data is eliminated i.e. the data can be searched in its raw form, this makes Azure AI Search a very powerful tool when used with Azure Stack.
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Island
The only reason I didn't gave the maximum rating is because it's not cheap, if you have a smaller company you can use some plugins instead depending on what you need. But I completely understand it's not safer than the Island browser. However, it would be great to have a simpler version for small companies too, that wouldn't require much testing to setup. Besides that, Island is my first choice when thinking about safety for remote workers.
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Pros
Microsoft
  • Incredibly robust back-end infrastructure.
  • Streamlined integration into Microsoft's Azure Cloud.
  • From a user standpoint, it lets the customer easily access their data and provide useful search tips.
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Island
  • The agent can still see the customer's data that they need to help the customers, but without the ability to screenshot, copy and download outside the Island browser, that also prevent data leaks
  • The organization also saves money without the need of hiring only local employees, people can download it on their personal desktops
  • Can replace setups with VPN that are expensive or virtual desktops
  • Blocks unsafe websites that can also copy the client and customer data
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Cons
Microsoft
  • Like virtually all Azure services, it has first-class treatment for .Net as the developer platform of choice, but largely ignores other options. While there is a first-party Python SDK, there are only community packages for other languages like Ruby and Node. Might be a game of roulette for those to be kept up-to-date. This might make it a non-starter for some teams that don't want to do the work to integrate with the REST API directly.
  • In my opinion, partitions inside of Azure Search don't count as data segregation for customers in a multi-tenant app, so any application where you have many customers with high-security concerns, Azure Search is probably a non-starter.
  • To elaborate on the multi-tenant issue: Azure Search's approach to pricing is pretty steep. While there is a free tier for small applications (50MB of content or less) the first paid tier is about 14x more expensive than the first SQL Database tier that supports full-text search. For many applications, it makes a lot more economic sense to just run some LIKE or CONTAINS queries on columns in a table rather than going with Azure Search.
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Island
  • Sometimes the advisors may experience some glitches to copy and paste the information they need even if they're still inside the Island browser
  • Sometimes some apps don't behave exactly the same and they would in other browsers
  • It takes some time to setup it accordingly with what the company needs and it requires some tests
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Usability
Microsoft
I want to improve their product and also want to learn Azure AI Search like a professional and use it with full feature but their price is too high, so now I use the free plan as of now, but it takes a very large amount of data, type is few minutes, and give result that I want.
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Island
It requires some training but it's very easy to use, as it's much like other famous browsers and it behave just as them. Even if it needs to be set up, you can set different policies for different users, that can be quite useful for bigger companies. However, some employees can feel a bit restricted as it has it's limitations to download or copy and paste
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Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
Product enhancement and recent updates, Azure AI Search has become more cost-effective, especially for large-scale generative AI applications2.
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Island
Chrome Remote Desktop is a good option to access the company desktop remotely, but it doesn't reduce the costs of the company since you'll still need to have two machines for it to work, you'll also need the same amount of IT staff and mantain a physical address. It can be a good option to companies that have only few agents remote but it's not good for hybrid or remote only employees
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Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • When integrated with our existing file system the Azure AI Search helped users tremendously by reducing search times and improve efficacy of intended result.
  • Since Azure AI Search is a PaaS solution, we had very short ideation to go-live timespan, which ended up reflecting in our product performance.
  • A rare but not negligible occurrence was correctness of search being questionable when new data was added to the system. The search returns false positive results.
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Island
  • There is some costs to training people to use Island, and also to test and setup the browser, if you're initiating a business, this should be considered
  • Some advisors may not have a compatible hardware, this can add to the migration costs
  • No need to have a physical address or servers, since everything is managed from the clould it can significantly lower the costs
  • You can reduce the IT staff and maintenance costs too
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ScreenShots