HP Autonomy Intelligent Universal Search (discontinued) vs. Inbenta Enterprise Search

It does a decent job at its core functions (that other free software does just as well or better).

If you are looking for an enterprise search platform that offers an easy to use interface and if high performance is not really your priority, then I believe Inbenta Enterprise Search would fit your use case. For most other situations, I would recommend using a tried and tested search platform like Apache Solr.

Incentivized

• It adheres to traditional Microsoft standards such as: fact-dump documentation with no coherent story or 'best practices' information, inability to automate common tasks, intentional obfuscation of its basic operations.
• It provides OK search results. Not great, but OK.

• Fairly easy to use interface.
• Quick to onboard new users, both in terms of access as well as training.
• The NLP-based semantic search feature is quite impressive.

Incentivized

• There are about a dozen different config files to maintain, and the most important one is dynamically modified by Autonomy itself while it runs. Which means that it is impossible to automate the configuration or keep the configs in versioned source control. Even `cp *.cfg ~/cfgbak/` won't help you roll back a change, because it is never safe to restore a previous config. You'll be using `diff new.cfg old.cfg` a lot.
• The Linux port is poorly thought out. The binaries are named *.exe. The StartService.sh scripts contain both `echo 'Are you sure you want to start the service? Hit ctrl-C to cancel''; read dummy` and, I kid you not, a `chmod a+x /path/to/my/binary.exe`.
• Many features are poorly documented, leading to lots of back and forth with the support department just to answer basic questions like "what does this error code in my logs signify?"
• It seems to reinvent the wheel, poorly, everywhere. E.g. the scheduled backup feature rolls through a user-defined finite list of directories in which to store backups. On day 0 it uses directory 0, on day 1 it uses directory 1, and after day N it rolls back and overwrites directory 0. Why would this be preferable to using a single directory and naming zip files based on the current timestamp?

• It is a fairly new tool in the market, so not much market feedback exists for this. This made us apprehensive in using it.
• The documentation and online forums are bare minimum.
• Quite buggy when working with multiple sources.

Incentivized

Management wants to see ROI on the (hefty) cost of purchasing this software, and has mandated that we continue using it. We would prefer to switch immediately.

Apache Solr to Inbenta is like Java to Python. Apache Solr is powerful and handles complex search platforms well. Inbenta, on the other hand, is meant to be easy to use and does not lay too much emphasis on performance. If you are a small or medium business, Inbenta may suit your needs better. However, if you wish to manage a large and complex search platform, Solr is the way to go.

Incentivized

• I have learned to tack a zero onto the end of any estimate I make for how long an Autonomy change will take in both planning and implementation.

• Enabled our developers to quickly deploy changes to the search model.
• NLP-powered semantic search feedback provides good actionable insights.

Incentivized