Dynamic Yield vs. Elasticsearch

For us, it is well suited for personalization. Since we are hospitality brand, we have different rooms sales inclusion based on different segmentation like Mem or Non-mem, Global or UAE, we have to personalize our landing pages accordingly so that we show the relevant information to relevant audience. The inactivity pop up box and newsletter signup popups work good for us. It does not work well in some scenario like Dynamic Yield offers built-in analytics focused on campaign and test performance, but it’s not a replacement for tools like GA4, Adobe Analytics. It lacks deep funnel tracking or complex reporting capabilities.

Incentivized

Elasticsearch is a really scalable solution that can fit a lot of needs, but the bigger and/or those needs become, the more understanding & infrastructure you will need for your instance to be running correctly. Elasticsearch is not problem-free - you can get yourself in a lot of trouble if you are not following good practices and/or if are not managing the cluster correctly. Licensing is a big decision point here as Elasticsearch is a middleware component - be sure to read the licensing agreement of the version you want to try before you commit to it. Same goes for long-term support - be sure to keep yourself in the know for this aspect you may end up stuck with an unpatched version for years.

Incentivized

• Provide fantastic support, both in relation to strategy/best practice and troubleshooting.
• An easy to use interface, as a user who is relatively new to Dynamic Yield I find that it is an intuitive platform to use.
• The ability to segment and drill down on data allows for really specific insights which, whilst not necessarily being leveraged on a testing basis, can be super valuable from a greater marketing perspective.

Incentivized

• As I mentioned before, Elasticsearch's flexible data model is unparalleled. You can nest fields as deeply as you want, have as many fields as you want, but whatever you want in those fields (as long as it stays the same type), and all of it will be searchable and you don't need to even declare a schema beforehand!
• Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, is super strong financially and they have a great team of devs and product managers working on Elasticsearch. When I first started using ES 3 years ago, I was 90% impressed and knew it would be a good fit. 3 years later, I am 200% impressed and blown away by how far it has come and gotten even better. If there are features that are missing or you don't think it's fast enough right now, I bet it'll be suitable next year because the team behind it is so dang fast!
• Elasticsearch is really, really stable. It takes a lot to bring down a cluster. It's self-balancing algorithms, leader-election system, self-healing properties are state of the art. We've never seen network failures or hard-drive corruption or CPU bugs bring down an ES cluster.

Incentivized

• Brand templates could need complex CSS/custom code.
• We'd like to see a little "i" next to specific labels, which elaborates on what is meant. For example, when I hover over "Dynamic allocation," I get something like "An advanced form of A/B testing where the best-performing variations receive higher traffic."
• Jargon (for example, for audience targeting) can be overwhelming for new users; therefore, clearer, user-friendly explanations are needed.

Incentivized

• Joining data requires duplicate de-normalized documents that make parent child relationships. It is hard and requires a lot of synchronizations
• Tracking errors in the data in the logs can be hard, and sometimes recurring errors blow up the error logs
• Schema changes require complete reindexing of an index

Incentivized

implementation took a long time but also, DY has really proven that they are transforming and adapting their platform to be more user friendly and the right technology choice for their brand or company

Incentivized

We're pretty heavily invested in ElasticSearch at this point, and there aren't any obvious negatives that would make us reconsider this decision.

Incentivized

Setting up strategies, audiences, and experiences is simple and fast. It is incredibly easy to modify the appearance of your site and optimize every aspect with the Dynamic Yield Personalizations. However, while the data visualization on an experience level is easy to modify and analyze, exporting the data in meaningful ways is time consuming.

Incentivized

To get started with Elasticsearch, you don't have to get very involved in configuring what really is an incredibly complex system under the hood. You simply install the package, run the service, and you're immediately able to begin using it. You don't need to learn any sort of query language to add data to Elasticsearch or perform some basic searching. If you're used to any sort of RESTful API, getting started with Elasticsearch is a breeze. If you've never interacted with a RESTful API directly, the journey may be a little more bumpy. Overall, though, it's incredibly simple to use for what it's doing under the covers.

Incentivized

Overall, the support is very good. If you are a partner (my case), they assign you a customer success manager, that helps a lot. Also, there is a technical person to provide support to the partners, again a great help.

My only "complain" is that with some complex issues, the support may delay in providing you with a solution. Sometimes that can cause some tension with your client.

Incentivized

We've only used it as an opensource tooling. We did not purchase any additional support to roll out the elasticsearch software. When rolling out the application on our platform we've used the documentation which was available online. During our test phases we did not experience any bugs or issues so we did not rely on support at all.

Incentivized

Do not mix data and master roles. Dedicate at least 3 nodes just for Master

Incentivized

Dynamic Yield provides far more capability and ready-to-go templates for small-medium sized businesses, as well as decent API implementation for businesses who want to have a deeper integration. The ease of implementation and faster time-to-market is why we chose Dynamic Yield.

As far as we are concerned, Elasticsearch is the gold standard and we have barely evaluated any alternatives. You could consider it an alternative to a relational or NoSQL database, so in cases where those suffice, you don't need Elasticsearch. But if you want powerful text-based search capabilities across large data sets, Elasticsearch is the way to go.

Incentivized

• Most tests have had a positive impact on either revenue or conversion rate - quite often in double digits.
• Dynamic Yield has also helped us to stop some particular initiatives through direct interaction with the customer base via questionnaires or by a test proving negative quicker than rolling out a permanent feature.

Incentivized

• We have had great luck with implementing Elasticsearch for our search and analytics use cases.
• While the operational burden is not minimal, operating a cluster of servers, using a custom query language, writing Elasticsearch-specific bulk insert code, the performance and the relative operational ease of Elasticsearch are unparalleled.
• We've easily saved hundreds of thousands of dollars implementing Elasticsearch vs. RDBMS vs. other no-SQL solutions for our specific set of problems.

Incentivized