Item: Algolia
Rating: 9
Author: Camilo Salinas

Overall Satisfaction with Algolia

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used Algolia to retrieve templates of medical records so our doctors were able to get faster descriptions for common medical records descriptions. With Algolia we indexed the documents, assigned some metadata with it so we could personalize the experience and finally recommended the doctor the most appropriate thing to write in its paragraph by autocompleting with the recommendations of Algolia search

Pros and Cons

Pros

Search
Indexing
Recommendations
Autocomplete

Cons

The UI components can be more flexible

Return on Investment

Without Algolia our product could not have existed
Our time to market got reduced by half

Alternatives Considered

Elasticsearch

Algolia works out of the box, you don't need to setup a lot to see how it works for you. Its also pretty flexible and customizable if you need to. With Elasticsearch you have to think about deployment strategies, where to host it, how to send data for it and build custom components to interact with it. Algolia is less hands on and works faster.

Key Insights

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?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Algolia go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Algolia again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Firebase, Twilio SendGrid

Likelihood to Recommend

Anything search for an application is pretty useful. If you have rich data Algolia makes it really easy to do recommendations or search suggestions without a lot of work. its pretty cheap also so its a win for almost every scenario. Finally you can implement fast with their UI libraries.

I wouldn't recommend this if your need for a search is not in-depth or is simply an exact text match. because you can achieve the same with minimal code. But if you need to go further or have to search for similarities like synonyms or words that mean something even though you cant remember, Algolia is a must

Comments

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