Elasticsearch vs. Luigi's Box

Elasticsearch is really well suited for searching text (Natural Language Processing) and you can fine tune the searches and scoring very well. I like the ability to find Significant Terms in the Index, where you can find aggregations that are really relevant to a specific search. It also allows for queries to lead to new queries via aggregations which is great for navigating your data. It is less suited to doing more complex aggregations where slices of data are required to be processing using guassian normalizations. And doing searches which join different documents is very very hard, and requires serious thought on how to denormalize data.

Incentivized

Luigi's Box is the perfect solution for sales platforms that have search engine problems on their site. Luigi's Box allows you to go to the next level and enable customers to find what they are looking for. With additional options to recommend and indicate substitutes and add-on products, it can work great as a sales-boosting element.

• Super-fast search on millions of documents. We've got over 2 billion documents in our index and the retrieve speeds are still in the < 1-second range.
• Analytics on top of your search. If you organize your data appropriately, Elasticsearch can serve as a distributed OLAP system
• Elasticsearch is great for geographic data as well, including searching and filtering with geojson, and a variety of geospatial algorithms.

Incentivized

• Wide access to the analysis panel that supports sales and helps analyze user behavior.
• Adapting functionality to the partner's needs, which confirms the flexibility of the tool.
• The boost function which allows us to prioritise showing customers certain products over others, which improves conversions.

Incentivized

• Setting Java memory thresholds can be a pain for those not accustomed to things like Eden Space & Old Generation which can lead to over allocation, or more likely, under allocation. Apache Solr had a similar issue. It would be nice if the program would take an extra step and dogfood it's own advice by analyzing the system & processes to return a solid recommendation for that configuration. The proper configuration information is outlined in the documentation, it would be nice if that was automated.
• The only health check that ElasticSearch reports back is a "red" status without any real solid information about what is going on, though its usually memory thresholds or disk I/O. I am currently on ElasticSearch 1.5 so that may have changed for newer versions. When the status goes "red", I as the administrator of the software, feel like I lose control of whats going on which should rarely happen. Something more verbose would eliminate that.
• This is more of a critique of the ElasticStack in general. The whole top to bottom stack is starting to get feature creep with things that are better suited in other software and increasing the barrier for entry for people to get started with setting up a robust logging infrastructure. ElasticSearch as a storage search engine, is pretty streamlined, but I can see that the tools that comprise the ELK Stack are going to require a certification with constant study at some point. During major release for Logstash a while back, it literally took a month to learn a new language because Elastic completely changed the syntax. For a medium sized organization of only a couple of admins, that is a pretty high bar where time is money. They really should work on refining/automating the tools & search engine they have, instead of shoehorning/changing things on to an already rock solid foundation.

Incentivized

• More choice for customisation and layout would be good.
• More payment options for example the choice to pay via direct debit.

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

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

Luigi's Box just slots in nicely to the website with very little code and has no negative impact on pagespeed scores. Having been using it for a number of months now, we have had no bugs or downtime. The search functionality works for every customer and even our staff use it every day to get to the product they want faster.

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

Their support is excellent. Quick and helpful.

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

Incentivized

Elasticsearch is the most well-known and supported free data platform that we identified. We are taking advantage of community knowledge and practices. In terms of flexibility and breadth of use cases no other competitor came close to Elasticsearch. We've tried Solr in the past be we encountered issues which were deal-breaking for us. MongoDB - it just did not pass our evaluation parameters as a main data platform. We still use it for smaller purposes, though.

Incentivized

In my opinion, Luigi's Box is superior. It was much easier to implement, customer service was better, the search results are much more accurate, the customization options are much more advanced, the analytics section is superior and the price for all of the tools that Luigi's Box has to offer is extremely reasonable. We did also try to build our own product in house, but this proved very difficult and complicated to get the results we wanted.

• I am not in finance and I suspect even if I was this would be hard to measure. But for sure, Elasticsearch has enabled us to have the most flexible data model in the industry for our customer's data, and in doing so we have attracted many many technical customers and got much of their $$$.
• One problem with Elasticsearch is that because it runs on the JVM, there can be some stop-the-world JVM garbage collections happening that can take down nodes and reduce indexing speed. The solution for that tends to be "let's just upgrade the CPU on that machine". And before you know it you are paying $$$ because this'll happen with 40+ machines.
• On the other hand, I do think that ES is more efficient than other systems and so it requires fewer nodes to keep it highly tolerant and available, so we probably saved some money that way.

Incentivized

• Reduction in the number of abandoned carts - since the launch of the service, we have seen a drop in cart abandonment by more than 10%
• Lower reports of product search problems from customers
• Analytical accounts - they were able to recommend many things to us and improve services