Algolia

We initially attempted an in-house search solution, which, though tailored to our preferences, demanded significant resources for upkeep. While our internally built search system allowed a deep understanding of rankings, Algolia emerged as a more efficient alternative. Algolia's ease of implementation and collaboration with the vendor proved valuable, offering a robust search functionality that works seamlessly after fine-tuning. The trade-off between customization and resource efficiency led us to choose Algolia for its effectiveness and streamlined approach once implemented.

Algolia prioritizes simplicity and quick setup, excelling in user-friendly search experiences. Elasticsearch offers versatility and complexity, suitable for intricate scenarios, while Amazon CloudSearch provides essential features and seamless integration within the AWS ecosystem. We chose Algolia based on our project's needs, technical proficiency, and desired level of control.

I have not use other products similar to Algolia

While AWS's offering is a typically cheaper solution, it requires a lot of work to gain any of the core features of Algolia. The cost of dev time and long-term maintenance would be more than the costs incurred with Algolia, which is why it made the most sense financially. On the engineering side, we could give our stakeholders access to Algolia to adjust the indices themselves, which would allow us to focus on other work.

There were few alternatives when we started by using Algolia and it was the better rated in terms of price & performance.
Now there are more alternatives, but we keep algolia as is isolated from the rest of our stack so that we can have better performance & control.

Algolia offered a more flexible toolset for us, and a faster, better experience for our customers.

Algolia has focused solely on site search for 10+ years, while Google has previously abandoned similar products. Algolia offers end-to-end AI processing, personalization, and automatic query categorization at scale. Deployment and usability is easier with Algolia compared to Google Retail Discovery AI. Algolia also offers a free merchandising studio for non-tech

Algolia provides the best user experience, ease of integration and implementation, extremely high performance on large catalogs. The features offered are powerful and complete, with machine learning systems to improve result personalization. The service management can be done without the need for dedicated experience on the search platforms.

In theory it offers more, but due to tech limitations we aren't using it to full capacity.

Algolia got us up and running faster and more easily than if we'd managed elastic search and it's configuration by ourselves. Upfront and ongoing costs and complications/ custom implementations were removed from the equation by choosing Algolia out of the gate.

We have choose Algolia, because is a more robust and scalable solution from a consolidated company in the market. A good differential is the time requrest to update information.

We found the implementation and specifically the built-in integration with Laravel hard to pass up.

SLI- We used SLI for about 8 years prior to Algolia and Aloglia is far more sophisticated in terms of Typo Tolerance, Synonyms and AI capabilities. It also allows for much easier global rule setting so that we can easily promote our Proprietary Brands.

Algolia supports Arabic, and it is fast and easy to implement.

We started to use Algolia because Firestore didn't provide full-text search.

At the time we did a TD on a number of different solutions, and Algolia was selected for its features and functionality. Why we couldn’t account for at the time was the lack of customer service and tech support, or problems that would regularly and repeatedly occur within their billing platform etc.

Algolia allows for very customised search results and this is not provided by similar products. This is the key advantage of Algolia.

Easiness to set up and maintain, our team at the moment we compared them was small and we were in an exploratory phase in the search engine feature. We needed to deploy something to our users quickly to start learning and avoid spending time in infrastructure configurations (like security) and Algolia provided all of this out of the box.

Faster and easy to integrate

Elasticsearch is its direct competitor, but I would say that it is more focused on performance and less focused on aesthetics and recommendations. If you are thinking of getting Algolia, I would recommend that you also compare it at least to Elasticsearch. Either one is a good upgrade from "out of the box" search tools.