Elasticsearch is an enterprise search tool from Elastic in Mountain View, California.
$16
per month
SiteSpect
Score 8.0 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Key features include:
- A/B, split, and multivariate testing campaign management
- Targeting and personalization
- Front-end usability testing
- Back-end testing using Origin Experiments
- Site acceleration with SiteSpect AMPS(R)
- Mobile site and native app support
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.
SiteSpect is great for businesses with available development resources and a need to provide flicker-free performance. Additionally, the month-to-month service model is attractive considering the contract and implementation prices of most of the tool's competitors. If an organization wants to run a lot of tests with a small team of marketers, I wouldn't recommend a tool as complex as SiteSpect. Effective use of the tool requires a lot of technical skill.
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.
It is able to intercept the code from your server, inject your code and then it continues on to the end-user's computer with virtually no speed interruptions.
It has several different options for performing A/B tests from regular factors to client-side factors, and origin experiments.
It is extremely flexible and configurable for the needs of your company or organization.
SiteSpect recently came out with a feature to test and optimize mobile applications. I have not used this, but it fills an important capability gap with the product I was using at the time.
Our clients who use our fully managed A/B and Multivariate testing services have been extremely happy with the results. Therefore the D&W and SiteSpect partnership continues to flourish. We have no hesitation in recommending the platform and we will continue to invest in our staff to train on this platform for the foreseeable future
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.
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.
Just need to have your requirements ready such as, what you are expecting from the tool, is there anything specific you want regarding reporting, tracking etc.
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.
I have used all the tools in the market. Sitespect kicks them into the curb based on how easy it is to build variations, and hot it doesnt interfere with client load.
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.
Easily test and optimize the effectiveness of landing pages, layouts, variations of copy, different offers, photos, navigation elements, links, buttons, and more – all without having to change your existing site.
