Algolia vs Solr search

Question

I'm building a product search platform. I used Solr search engine before, and i found its performance is fine but doesn't generate a user interface. Recently I found Algolia has more features, easy setup, and generates a User Interface. So if someone used Algolia before:

• Is Algolia performance better than Solr?
• Is there any difference between Algolia and Websolr ?

Enamor

You can contact algolia's support or create a free account and test it, I created one and one of them contacted me via email and they can setup a call/meeting to explain the basics. Websolr (afaik) does not provide the full list of features from solr. About performance, I've seen performance issues with solr (but it could be the implementation), we're changing to Algolia to take a look, plus they have analytics. – Koh

Answer 1

I'm using Algolia and SolR in production for an e-commerce website. You're right about what you say on Algolia. It's fast (really) and has a lot of powerful features. You have a complete dashboard to manage your search engine.

For SolR, it's ok but it's also a black box. You can fine tune your search engine, but it exhibits poor performance for semantic searches (I tested it).

If you have to make a choice, it depends on a lot of things. With Algolia, there are no servers to manage, easy configuration and integration. It's fast with 20 millions records for me (less than 15ms per search).

With SolR, you can customise a little bit more. But it's a lot of work. If I had to make a choice, it would be more between Algolia and ElasticSearch. SolR is losing velocity; it's hard to imagine it growing again in the next few years.

As a resume, if you want to be fast and efficient, choose Algolia. If you want to dive deep into a search engine architecture and you have a lot of time (count it in months), you can try ElasticSearch.

I hope that I was helpful with my answer, ask me if you have more questions.

Quarterly

Answer 2

Speed is a critical part of keeping users happy. Algolia is aggressively designed to reduce latency. In a benchmarking test, Algolia returned results up to 200x faster than Elasticsearch.

Out-of-the-box, Algolia provides prefix matching for as-you-type search, typo-tolerance with intelligent result highlighting, and a flexible, powerful ranking formula. The ranking formula makes it easy to combine textual relevance with business data like prices and popularity metrics. With Lucene-based search tools like Solr and Elasticsearch, the ranking formula must be designed and built from scratch, which can be very difficult for teams without deep search experience to get right.

Algolia’s highly-optimized infrastructure is distributed across the world in 15 regions and 47 datacenters. Algolia provides a 99.99% reliability guarantee and can deliver a fast search to users wherever in the world they’re connecting from. Elasticsearch and Solr do not automatically distribute to multiple regions, and doing so can incur significant server costs and devops resources

Jeraldinejeralee