Azure AI Search (formerly Azure Cognitive Search) is enterprise search as a service, from Microsoft.
$0.10
Per Hour
MongoDB Atlas
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
MongoDB Atlas is the company's automated managed cloud service, supplying automated deployment, provisioning and patching, and other features supporting database monitoring and optimization.
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.
I would recommend MongoDB Atlas to every company who have a significant need in the NoSQL database and do not want to manage their infrastructure. Using MongoDB Atlas can significantly reduce your management time and cost, which saves valuable resources for other tasks. It also suits a smaller company as MongoDB Atlas scales up and down very quickly.
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.
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.
As an independent entity, MongoDB Atlas is not included in existing subscriptions from AWS or Azure, requiring an additional support plan and reliance on a third party.
We love MongoDB support and have great relationship with them. When we decided to go with MongoDB Atlas, they sent a team of 5 to our company to discuss the process of setting up a Mongo cluster and walked us through. when we have questions, we create a ticket and they will respond very quickly
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.
MongoDB Atlas has been in the market for very long time and there are bunch of documentation, training and support for it. It also is specifically designed for the use case similar to our project and big companies in the market uses them for very high load which made us confident about our choice.
