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Lucene VS Apache Solr

Compare Lucene VS Apache Solr and see what are their differences

Lucene logo Lucene

Search Engines

Apache Solr logo Apache Solr

Solr is an open source enterprise search server based on Lucene search library, with XML/HTTP and...
  • Lucene Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-01
  • Apache Solr Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-28

Lucene features and specs

  • High Performance
    Lucene is designed for high-performance indexing and searching. It can handle large volumes of data and provide fast search results, making it suitable for applications requiring quick data retrieval.
  • Scalability
    Lucene is highly scalable, capable of managing and performing well with large datasets. Its performance remains consistent across varying data sizes, which is critical for growing applications.
  • Flexibility and Customizability
    Lucene offers a high degree of flexibility and customizability, allowing developers to tailor search capabilities to specific needs, including custom scoring, tokenization, and ranking algorithms.
  • Rich Features
    Lucene provides a comprehensive set of features such as term boosting, wildcard queries, proximity searches, and more, which enhance its search capabilities for complex querying needs.
  • Open Source Community
    As an Apache project, Lucene benefits from a robust open-source community, ensuring continuous updates, improvements, and support, fostering a reliable and well-maintained codebase.

Possible disadvantages of Lucene

  • Complexity
    Lucene's comprehensive feature set leads to complexity in understanding and configuring the system, which might pose a learning curve for new users.
  • Java Dependency
    Lucene is written in Java, which may require specific knowledge or adaptations to integrate into systems primarily using other programming languages.
  • Limited to Full-Text Search
    While Lucene excels at full-text search, it might not be the best choice for applications requiring advanced data analytics, which may require integration with other data processing tools.
  • Resource Intensive
    Lucene can be resource-intensive, particularly during indexing operations, requiring careful management of memory and storage to achieve optimal performance.

Apache Solr features and specs

  • Scalability
    Apache Solr is highly scalable, capable of handling large amounts of data and numerous queries per second. It supports distributed search and indexing, which allows for horizontal scaling by adding more nodes.
  • Flexibility
    Solr provides flexible schema management, allowing for dynamic field definitions and easy handling of various data types. It supports a variety of search query types and can be customized to meet specific search requirements.
  • Rich Feature Set
    Solr comes with a wealth of features out-of-the-box, including faceted search, result highlighting, multi-index search, and advanced filtering capabilities. It also offers robust analytics and joins support.
  • Community and Documentation
    Being an open-source project, Apache Solr has a strong community and comprehensive documentation, which ensures continuous improvements, updates, and extensive support resources for developers.
  • Integrations
    Solr integrates well with a variety of databases and data sources, and it provides REST-like APIs for ease of integration with other applications. It also has strong support for popular programming languages like Java, Python, and Ruby.
  • Performance
    Solr is built on top of Apache Lucene, which provides high performance for searching and indexing. It is optimized for speed and can handle rapid data ingestion and real-time indexing.

Possible disadvantages of Apache Solr

  • Complexity
    The initial setup and configuration of Apache Solr can be complex, particularly for those not already familiar with search engines and indexing concepts. Managing a distributed Solr installation also requires considerable expertise.
  • Resource Intensive
    Running Solr, especially for large datasets, can be resource-intensive in terms of both memory and CPU. It requires careful tuning and adequate hardware to maintain performance.
  • Learning Curve
    The learning curve for Apache Solr can be steep due to its extensive feature set and the complexity of its configuration options. New users may find it challenging to get up to speed quickly.
  • Consistency Issues
    In distributed setups, ensuring data consistency can be challenging, particularly for users unfamiliar with managing clustered environments. There may be delays or issues with synchronizing indexes across multiple nodes.
  • Maintenance
    Ongoing maintenance of a Solr instance, including monitoring, tuning, and scaling, can be labor-intensive. This requires dedicated effort to keep the system running efficiently over time.
  • Limited Real-time Capabilities
    Although Solr provides near real-time indexing, it may not be as effective as some specialized real-time search engines. For applications requiring truly real-time capabilities, additional solutions might be necessary.

Analysis of Apache Solr

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Apache Solr is generally considered a good option for organizations seeking a reliable, scalable, and flexible search platform. It offers extensive features and is supported by a strong community, making it a solid choice for many use cases.

Why this product is good

  • Apache Solr is highly regarded for its robust full-text search capabilities, scalability, and ease of integration. As an open-source search platform, it is built on Apache Lucene and provides powerful distributed search and indexing, replication, load-balanced querying, and automated failover and recovery. Solr is designed to handle large volumes of data efficiently and supports various data formats with powerful data management features.

Recommended for

    Apache Solr is recommended for organizations that need to implement powerful search capabilities, especially those managing large, complex datasets. It is ideal for businesses that require full-text search features, e-commerce sites, content management systems, and big data applications that demand high query performance and scalability.

Lucene videos

Lucene Indexing Tutorial | Solr Indexing Tutorial | Search Engine Indexing | Solr Tutorial |Edureka

More videos:

  • Review - Lucene Search Essentials: Scorers, Collectors and Custom Queries, Mikhail Khludnev
  • Review - Television News Search and Analysis with Lucene/Solr

Apache Solr videos

Solr Index - Learn about Inverted Indexes and Apache Solr Indexing

More videos:

  • Review - Solr Web Crawl - Crawl Websites and Search in Apache Solr

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Lucene and Apache Solr)
Custom Search Engine
22 22%
78% 78
Search Engine
25 25%
75% 75
Custom Search
20 20%
80% 80
Development
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Lucene and Apache Solr

Lucene Reviews

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Apache Solr Reviews

Top 10 Site Search Software Tools & Plugins for 2022
Apache Solr is optimized to handle high-volume traffic and is easy to scale up or down depending on your changing needs. The near real-time indexing capabilities ensure that your content remains fresh and search results are always relevant and updated. For more advanced customization, Apache Solr boasts extensible plug-in architecture so you can easily plug in index and...
5 Open-Source Search Engines For your Website
Apache Solr is the popular, blazing-fast, open-source enterprise search platform built on Apache Lucene. Solr is a standalone search server with a REST-like API. You can put documents in it (called "indexing") via JSON, XML, CSV, or binary over HTTP. You query it via HTTP GET and receive JSON, XML, CSV, or binary results.
Source: vishnuch.tech
Elasticsearch vs. Solr vs. Sphinx: Best Open Source Search Platform Comparison
Solr is not as quick as Elasticsearch and works best for static data (that does not require frequent changing). The reason is due to caches. In Solr, the caches are global, which means that, when even the slightest change happens in the cache, all indexing demands a refresh. This is usually a time-consuming process. In Elastic, on the other hand, the refreshing is made by...
Source: greenice.net
Algolia Review – A Hosted Search API Reviewed
If you’re not 100% satisfied with Algolia, there are always alternative methods to accomplish similar results, such as Solr (open-source & self-hosted) or ElasticSearch (open-source or hosted). Both of these are built on Apache Lucene, and their search syntax is very similar. Amazon Elasticsearch Service provides a fully managed Elasticsearch service which makes it easy to...
Source: getstream.io

Social recommendations and mentions

Lucene might be a bit more popular than Apache Solr. We know about 26 links to it since March 2021 and only 19 links to Apache Solr. 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.

Lucene mentions (26)

  • Testing MongoDB Atlas Search Java Apps Using TestContainers
    MongoDB Atlas Search is an extension to the built-in indexing capabilities that are part of MongoDB itself, using the awesome open source indexing and query library Lucene. MongoDB has built a wrapper around Lucene called mongot. Mongot has two responsibilities: First, it follows the change stream of any collection you choose to index and builds Lucene indexes asynchronously. Second, when you run the $search... - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Integrating Full-Text Search with Hibernate Search in a Java Application
    Implementing full-text search in an application can be challenging, but Hibernate Search simplifies the process by offering a built-in solution that requires minimal configuration. It seamlessly integrates with powerful search engines like Elasticsearch and Lucene, enabling efficient and scalable search capabilities. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Unveiling Apache Lucene: Open Source Innovation, Funding, and Community
    In today’s digital landscape, open source projects are the engines of innovation that drive technological progress and collaboration. One such powerhouse is Apache Lucene. Recognized as one of the most advanced high-performance text search engine libraries, Apache Lucene not only excels technically but also sets a benchmark in open source business models and sustainable funding. In this post, we delve into... - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Lucene and I
    It just be this easy with a little Java elbow grease. And because it’s fairly straightforward to send data into Lucene and then query it powerfully, and because Mr. Cutting nurtured such a benevolent, inviting yet demanding, open source environment, an entire ecosystem of add-ons, forks, ports, wrappers, and companies, and ... And ... AND! - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Considerations for Unicode and Searching
    Solr is based on the Lucene library, as is Elastic. I mention this because these two search engines provide most private web site search capabilities on the internet. I started using Lucene around 25 years ago in Perl - it works well. - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago
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Apache Solr mentions (19)

  • List of 45 databases in the world
    Solr — Open-source search platform built on Apache Lucene. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • Considerations for Unicode and Searching
    I want to spend the brunt of this article talking about how to do this in Postgres, partly because it's a little more difficult there. But let me start in Apache Solr, which is where I first worked on these issues. - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago
  • Swirl: An open-source search engine with LLMs and ChatGPT to provide all the answers you need 🌌
    Using the Galaxy UI, knowledge workers can systematically review the best results from all configured services including Apache Solr, ChatGPT, Elastic, OpenSearch, PostgreSQL, Google BigQuery, plus generic HTTP/GET/POST with configurations for premium services like Google's Programmable Search Engine, Miro and Northern Light Research. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • Looking for software
    Apache Solr can be used to index and search text-based documents. It supports a wide range of file formats including PDFs, Microsoft Office documents, and plain text files. https://solr.apache.org/. Source: about 2 years ago
  • 'google-like' search engine for files on my NAS
    If so, then https://solr.apache.org/ can be a solution, though there's a bit of setup involved. Oh yea, you get to write your own "search interface" too which would end up calling solr's api to find stuff. Source: over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Lucene and Apache Solr, you can also consider the following products

Doxygen - Generate documentation from source code

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

DocFX - A documentation generation tool for API reference and Markdown files!

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.

Daux.io - Daux.io is a documentation generator that uses a simple folder structure and Markdown files to...

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