Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Algolia VS Typesense

Compare Algolia VS Typesense 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.

Typesense logo Typesense

Typo tolerant, delightfully simple, open source search 🔍
  • Algolia Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-19
  • Typesense Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-11-07

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.

Typesense features and specs

  • High Performance
    Typesense offers highly optimized search capabilities with fast response times, ensuring quick retrieval of search results even with large datasets.
  • Easy to Set Up
    Typesense is user-friendly and can be quickly set up using a simple configuration, making it accessible for developers who need a straightforward search solution.
  • Real-Time Indexing
    Typesense supports real-time indexing, meaning new data or updates to existing data are searchable almost immediately without significant delay.
  • Open Source
    Being an open-source solution, Typesense provides transparency, community support, and the possibility for customization to meet specific needs.
  • Typo Tolerance
    Typesense’s built-in typo tolerance allows for forgiving spell-check and correction, enhancing user experience by returning relevant results despite minor typing errors.
  • Faceted Search
    The platform supports faceted search, which lets users narrow down search results through various categories, improving relevancy and user navigation.

Possible disadvantages of Typesense

  • Limited Advanced Features
    Compared to some competitors, Typesense offers fewer advanced search features like natural language processing or machine learning-based relevance tuning.
  • Community Support
    Being relatively newer, Typesense has a smaller user base and community support compared to established search engines like ElasticSearch or Solr.
  • Documentation
    Some users may find Typesense’s documentation to be less comprehensive, potentially leading to a steeper learning curve for complex use-cases.
  • Scalability
    While Typesense is scalable, enterprise-level users managing extremely large datasets might find it less robust compared to established solutions that have been battle-tested in large-scale environments.
  • Ecosystem Integration
    The integration ecosystem is still developing, which means fewer out-of-the-box integrations with other popular tools and platforms compared to older search engines.

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?

Typesense videos

Getting started with Typesense

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Algolia and Typesense)
Custom Search Engine
64 64%
36% 36
Custom Search
68 68%
32% 32
Search API
100 100%
0% 0
Search Engine
53 53%
47% 47

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 Typesense

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

Typesense Reviews

Best Elasticsearch alternatives for search
A plug for yours truly! At Relevance AI, we’re building an Elasticsearch alternative that is very different to alternatives like Algolia and Typesense. Relevance AI search is an instant search API that understands “semantics”.
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
Recommendations for Poor Man's ElasticSearch on AWS?
Oh hey! I'm one of the co-founders of Typesense. Delighted to stumble on a mention of Typesense on Indiehackers. Long time lurker, first time poster :)

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Typesense seems to be a lot more popular than Algolia. While we know about 58 links to Typesense, we've tracked only 3 mentions of Algolia. 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)

Typesense mentions (58)

View more

What are some alternatives?

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

ElasticSearch - Elasticsearch is an open source, distributed, RESTful search engine.

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

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.

Vespa.ai - Store, search, rank and organize big data