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Apache Solr and Drupal 8 are a match made in heaven!
May 31, 2019

Apache Solr and Drupal 8 are a match made in heaven!

Richard Davies | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Apache Solr

We use Solr as the search engine for our new city-wide website that we're building using the Drupal open source content management system. We want to make it easy for citizens to find the city services and information that they're seeking and search is a critical feature. We need it to deliver quick, accurate, and relevant results.
  • Solr is very flexible and can be customized to meet your specific needs and requirements.
  • Solr is fast at returning search results.
  • Solr is pretty much an industry standard so there's a good chance other software programs have modules designed to work with it.
  • It has a steep learning curve. It's not intuitive how to configure it or customize it.
  • It doesn't include a web crawler. Indexing your website requires adding a separate web crawler or using their API to add information to the index.
  • Debugging and troubleshooting query issues can be a difficult task.
  • It's enabled us to deliver fast, relevant search results on our new website. The site is still in beta and being actively developed so our complete ROI is still unknown.
  • It integrates very well with Drupal so it has saved us from having to develop a custom solution.
We tried to use both Elasticsearch and Swiftype with Drupal 8 but there are currently no good modules that integrate Drupal with those solutions. So Solr was really the only option for a Drupal 8 web site. It's not as easy to learn or use as Swiftype, but in the end I think it will be a little less expensive and offer more customization and flexibility.
Solr is an open source product so it's available for free. It's a good choice if you want to keep costs down but need a powerful and flexible search engine. But it will require some time to learn how to use it effectively. Also, you will either need to maintain it on your own server (which takes time and expertise) or pay to have someone else maintain it on a hosted server.

It's not the best choice if you want a turnkey solution that's quick to implement and easy to configure. But those type of solutions are usually very expensive.