Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Algolia VS ElasticSearch

Compare Algolia VS ElasticSearch and see what are their differences

Algolia logo Algolia

Algolia's Search API makes it easy to deliver a great search experience in your apps & websites. Algolia Search provides hosted full-text, numerical, faceted and geolocalized search.

ElasticSearch logo ElasticSearch

Elasticsearch is an open source, distributed, RESTful search engine.
  • Algolia Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-19
  • ElasticSearch Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-10

Algolia

$ Details
Release Date
2012 January
Startup details
Country
United States
State
California
Founder(s)
Julien Lemoine
Employees
250 - 499

Algolia features and specs

  • Speed
    Algolia is known for its incredibly fast search results. It can return search results in milliseconds, enhancing user experience on any application.
  • Ease of Integration
    Algolia provides easy-to-use APIs and extensive documentation, making it straightforward to integrate into various technologies and platforms.
  • Customizable Relevance
    With Algolia, you can fine-tune the relevance of your search results using an extensive set of customizable settings and ranking algorithms.
  • Scalability
    Algolia can handle large amounts of data and user queries, ensuring scalable performance as your application grows.
  • Real-time Indexing
    Changes to your indexed data are reflected in real-time, ensuring that the search results are always up-to-date.
  • Faceted Search and Filtering
    Algolia provides robust faceted search capabilities, allowing users to filter search results dynamically based on various criteria.
  • Multilingual Support
    Algolia supports search queries in multiple languages, making it feasible for applications with a global user base.
  • Advanced Analytics
    Algolia offers detailed analytics and insights, helping you to better understand how users interact with your search feature and to improve it continuously.

Possible disadvantages of Algolia

  • Cost
    Algolia can be quite expensive, especially for small businesses and startups, as pricing is based on the number of operations and indexing.
  • Complexity in Advanced Features
    While the basic setup is straightforward, implementing advanced features and fine-tuning relevance can require significant technical expertise.
  • Limited Free Tier
    The free tier of Algolia is limited in terms of indexing and operations, which may not be sufficient for even moderately-sized projects.
  • Data Hosting Regulations
    Algolia's cloud-based hosting means that data may not always reside in the same country as your user base, which could be a concern for businesses needing to comply with specific data sovereignty regulations.
  • Dependence on Third-party Service
    Reliance on a third-party service for crucial functionality like search means that your application could be affected by downtime or service changes at Algolia.
  • Customization Requires Coding
    Any significant customization or specific use-case implementation requires coding effort, which could be a barrier for non-technical users.

ElasticSearch features and specs

  • Scalability
    ElasticSearch is highly scalable, allowing you to handle large volumes of data and distribute indexing and search tasks across multiple nodes.
  • Real-Time Data
    It provides real-time indexing and searching capabilities, making it suitable for applications that require up-to-the-minute data retrieval and analysis.
  • Full-Text Search
    ElasticSearch is well-known for its powerful full-text search capabilities, enabling complex search queries and supporting a wide range of search options.
  • Complex Query Support
    It offers a rich query language allowing for complex and nested searching with filters, aggregations, and more.
  • Distributed Architecture
    ElasticSearch is designed to be distributed by nature, making it resilient to node failures and allowing data and search requests to be distributed across a cluster.
  • Open Source
    ElasticSearch is open-source, offering flexibility and a large community of developers that contribute to its continuous improvement and support.
  • Analytics
    Besides search, it also supports powerful analytics and visualization tools, especially when integrated with Kibana, its visualization dashboard.
  • Integrations
    ElasticSearch can easily integrate with various data sources and frameworks, enhancing its usability across different applications.

Possible disadvantages of ElasticSearch

  • Complexity
    Operating ElasticSearch can be complex, particularly when dealing with large-scale deployments, requiring specialized knowledge and expertise.
  • Resource Intensive
    ElasticSearch can be resource-intensive, requiring significant amounts of RAM and CPU, which can be costly for large-scale operations.
  • Consistency
    As a distributed system, ElasticSearch can sometimes face consistency issues, especially in scenarios involving partitions or network failures.
  • Security
    Though security features are available, they often require additional configurations and are more robust in the paid versions, which can be a concern for open-source users.
  • Cost
    While the core ElasticSearch software is open-source, scaling and additional features (like security, monitoring, and machine learning) are part of the paid Elastic Stack offerings.
  • Learning Curve
    There is a steep learning curve associated with mastering ElasticSearch and its query DSL (Domain Specific Language), which can be a barrier for new users.
  • Maintenance
    Properly maintaining an ElasticSearch cluster requires ongoing management, monitoring, and tuning to ensure optimal performance.
  • Backup and Restore
    Managing backups and restores can be cumbersome and is not as straightforward as in some other databases or data storage solutions.

Algolia videos

Discover Algolia #1 - When To Use (and not to use) Algolia

More videos:

  • Review - Algolia Search – The fastest prestashop module
  • Review - What is Algolia?

ElasticSearch videos

What is Elasticsearch?

More videos:

  • Review - Real world Elasticsearch Compose/Stack File Review
  • Demo - Elastic Search

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Algolia and ElasticSearch)
Custom Search Engine
54 54%
46% 46
Custom Search
58 58%
42% 42
Search API
66 66%
34% 34
Search Engine
47 47%
53% 53

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Algolia and ElasticSearch

Algolia Reviews

Top 9 Best WordPress Search Plugins To Improve Default Searches
This should allow a sufficient number of searches for many websites, so it’s worth checking out. Be sure to install Algolia’s official WordPress plugin to integrate it into your website.
Source: winningwp.com
4 Leading Enterprise Search Software to Look For in 2022
Algolia is a SaaS-based enterprise search software using RESTful API for websites and applications. Search Algolia API provides high performance and less than 10 ms of data response on average.
Top 10 Site Search Software Tools & Plugins for 2022
Algolia is a powerful search API that comes with a full-featured search engine. The lightning-fast search engine is typo-tolerant and language-aware, which helps to improve search relevance. It’s highly customizable so you can create unique search experiences for your customers.
Best Elasticsearch alternatives for search
Algolia is your standard choice of the Elasticsearch alternatives, having shot to popularity thanks to their low latency search and easy to implement prebuilt component library, Algolia Instant Search.
Source: relevance.ai
5 Open-Source Search Engines For your Website
Typesense is a fast, typo-tolerant search engine for building delightful search experiences. It claims that it is an Easier-to-Use ElasticSearch Alternative & an Open Source Algolia Alternative.
Source: vishnuch.tech

ElasticSearch Reviews

Log analysis: Elasticsearch vs Apache Doris
Benchmark tests with ES Rally, the official testing tool for Elasticsearch, showed that Apache Doris was around 5 times as fast as Elasticsearch in data writing, 2.3 times as fast in queries, and it consumed only 1/5 of the storage space that Elasticsearch used. On the test dataset of HTTP logs, it achieved a writing speed of 550 MB/s and a compression ratio of 10:1.
4 Leading Enterprise Search Software to Look For in 2022
“ We’ve built some big data search and mobile desktop applications that help our customers experience fast natural language search. Some applications require this, where I need to find data, I don’t want to build some complex query, I just need to ask the system “help me search for this information, narrow my results” and I don't want to wait several seconds. We’ve built a...
Top 10 Site Search Software Tools & Plugins for 2022
Elasticsearch is built for human users, which means that it’s equipped to handle mistakes that humans often make such as typos. This helps to improve search relevance and enhance the overall search experience. It offers real-time crawling, which automatically detects changes in content and ensures that search results are fresh and relevant.
Best Elasticsearch alternatives for search
However, when it comes to dealing with synonyms (i.e. ‘smart phone’ for ‘Samsung Galaxy’), slang (i.e. ‘kicks’ for ‘Nike Air Jordans’) and context (i.e. ‘car park’ is different to ‘dog park’) – you have to set up a bunch of manual rules/definitions with Elasticsearch and co.
Source: relevance.ai
5 Open-Source Search Engines For your Website
Elasticsearch provides key features like Advanced Full-Text Search Capabilities like Data indexing, Search capabilities including phrases, wildcards, auto suggestions, filters & facets, etc... Elasticsearch can also be used for other use-cases like
Source: vishnuch.tech

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, ElasticSearch should be more popular than Algolia. It has been mentiond 17 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Algolia mentions (3)

ElasticSearch mentions (17)

  • ElasticSearch from the Azure store or from Elastic.co?
    What surprised me is that on the Azure store, the only option I see is (Pay as you go), whereas on elastic.co there are the standard platinum and enterprise tiers followed by a where to deploy page and a pricing overview. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Hunspell on elastic.co cloud
    Can anyone help me how to upload custom hunspell stemmer files to elastic cloud (elastic.co)? According to elastic docs it should go under elasticsearch/config/hunspell, but according to cloud docs I should upload it via features/extension tab. So I tried zipping the hunspell folder and uploading it. I also figured out that it should be in the dictionaries folder, but after uploading it still doesn't work. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Creating a modern, SaaS website.. what am I missing?
    I can't figure out where I have to go to get more or less of a custom, premium website. I should mention that I look up to websites like elastic.co for example, would be very happy with something like that. I could really use some guidance! Source: about 2 years ago
  • Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2022)
    Elastic | Multiple software engineering roles | REMOTE (EMEA) | Full-time | https://elastic.co Elastic offers solutions for security and observability that are built on a single, open technology stack that can be deployed anywhere. Elastic Security enables security teams to prevent, detect, and respond to attacks with a solution built atop the speed and reliable of the Elastic stack. The Security External... - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • Seeking clarification about which part of ElasticSearch to use for our website
    I have been trying to digest the elastic.co website to try to understand how we can use elastic search, but I've come to a point where I'm not sure which part of elastic, (if any) makes sense for us. In fact I am royally confused. I wonder if anyone here can help clarify? Source: almost 3 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Algolia and ElasticSearch, you can also consider the following products

Typesense - Typo tolerant, delightfully simple, open source search 🔍

Apache Solr - Solr is an open source enterprise search server based on Lucene search library, with XML/HTTP and...

Site Search 360 - Site Search 360 enhances and improves your built-in CMS or product search with autocompletion, semantic search, filters, facets, detailed analytics, and a whole lot of customization options.

Swiftype - The simplest way to add search to your website or application. Sign up for free.

Meilisearch - Ultra relevant, instant, and typo-tolerant full-text search API

Swiftype Site Search - Swiftype Site Search helps to sell more, get the right answer to more people on the platform and surface relevant content for readers and followers.