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Algolia - fast search results with fast go-to-market
February 04, 2020

Algolia - fast search results with fast go-to-market

Sagiv Frankel | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Algolia

It is used across development departments as the API from searching different system entities.
We could have gone with our own Elasticsearch setup. However, this would require maintaining a dedicated cluster over multiple regions. That has operational cost. We would also need expertise on best practices in tuning the different indexes and keeping the service highly available.
We choose to let Algolia take care of out text search needs and only take care of keeping it synced.
  • Very little infrastructure needed. Can be used directly from client or from different services.
  • Very reliable. We had very little down time if at all. Response times are good.
  • Search API is a little confusing (what is a facet?).
  • UI is nice, but it doesn't do a good job in helping you define your queries.
  • Fast and reliable search indexes.
  • Highly available service over multiple regions.
Algolia does not require your own setup so we could get going fast. Algolia is known for being fast and highly available. It requires less domain knowledge. It is a lot more expensive though. Another plus is that is it very easy to sync data to it. You can backfill millions of records in less than a minute.
We did have one occurrence where we maxed out our plan and the service didn't respond well. This is probably a very common scenario and it took half a day to get things back to normal with slow response time. Price is also a consideration. If you are restrained in that sense you might want to dedicate the time to having your own setup from the get-go.

Do you think Algolia delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Algolia's feature set?

Yes

Did Algolia live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Algolia go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Algolia again?

Yes

It's less appropriate if you can't afford your data being persisted on a cloud service. Also, if search is a key component of your business I don't believe relying on a third-party service is worth it. Deploying your own Elasticsearch cluster is not that hard of an endeavour and would also save you money.
However, for any other use case Algolia will save you a lot of time and give your business amazing full text search capabilities with minimum friction and time.