Azure AI Search (formerly Azure Cognitive Search) is enterprise search as a service, from Microsoft.
$0.10
Per Hour
Yext
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Yext is a digital experience software provider headquartered in New York, New York.
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Pricing
Azure AI Search
Yext
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
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Azure Cognitive Search
Yext
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
