Algolia: With great power comes expensive pricing
January 08, 2019
Algolia: With great power comes expensive pricing
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Algolia
We used Algolia at our organization to power search for all our users. We leveraged the speed and efficiency offered by Algolia to greatly improve the user experience on our site when it came to searching for different types of records. As search speed had previously been a glaring issue and one of the biggest weaknesses on our web platform, Algolia helped us circumvent this issue and offer our users the results they were looking for in mere nanoseconds.
Pros
- Extremely fast search speeds
- Great technical support team
- Willingness of the company to work with customers on pricing
Cons
- It is difficult to scale the product, considering the pricing.
- Building relevancy algorithms can get extremely expensive
- Requires thorough knowledge of Algolia's documentation and framework to optimize for performance while sticking to your budget
- Users who had abandoned our product (attributing slow search speeds as the reason) returned to us thanks to Algolia
- We used Algolia as our product's backbone to relaunch it, making it the center of all search on our platform which paid off massively.
- Considering we relaunched our product, with Aloglia functioning as its engine, we got a lot of press coverage for our highly improved search speeds.
- One negative would be how important it is to read the fine print when it comes to the technical documentation. As pricing is done on the basis of records and indexes, it is not made apparent that there is a size limit for your records or how quickly these numbers can increase for any particular use case. Be very wary of these as they can quite easily exceed your allotted budget for the product.
By far Elasticsearch is the prime competitor that comes into the picture when thinking about Algolia. Where Algolia surpasses Elasticsearch by miles is in performance. Algolia is search on steroids. However, Elasticsearch supersedes Algolia in terms of flexibility and cost. Elasticsearch is less expensive when it comes to customizing and building more complex search algorithms for your website. With Algolia, unless you are in one of the higher tiers, it is difficult to customize and improve search algorithms while sticking to your budget.
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