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Lucene VS Sphinx Search

Compare Lucene VS Sphinx Search and see what are their differences

Lucene logo Lucene

Search Engines

Sphinx Search logo Sphinx Search

Sphinx is an open source full text search server, designed with performance, relevance (search quality), and integration simplicity in mind. Sphinx lets you either batch index and search data stored in files, an SQL database, NoSQL storage.
  • Lucene Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-01
  • Sphinx Search Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-08

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.

Sphinx Search features and specs

  • High Performance
    Sphinx Search is optimized for high performance, allowing it to handle large datasets efficiently and perform searches quickly.
  • Full-Text Search
    It provides robust full-text search capabilities, including support for advanced search operators and ranking algorithms.
  • Scalability
    Designed to scale both vertically and horizontally, making it suitable for projects that need to accommodate growing data volumes.
  • Integration
    Sphinx can easily integrate with various programming languages and existing databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and more.
  • Open Source
    Being an open-source software, Sphinx provides flexibility in terms of customization and cost-effectiveness.

Possible disadvantages of Sphinx Search

  • Complex Configuration
    Configuring Sphinx Search can be complex and might require a steep learning curve for new users.
  • Limited Multi-Language Support
    While it offers some support for multiple languages, it may not have as comprehensive language handling capabilities as some other search engines.
  • Lack of Real-Time Indexing
    Sphinx is not inherently designed for real-time indexing, which can be a limitation for use cases requiring instant updates.
  • Community Support
    Although it has an active community, the support network is not as extensive as those for larger, more established platforms.
  • Feature Set
    The feature set might not be as extensive or modern compared to other search platforms that have more recent updates and enhancements.

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

Sphinx Search videos

No Sphinx Search videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Lucene and Sphinx Search)
Custom Search Engine
52 52%
48% 48
Custom Search
60 60%
40% 40
Search Engine
44 44%
56% 56
Documentation
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 Lucene and Sphinx Search

Lucene Reviews

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Sphinx Search Reviews

The most overlooked part in software development - writing project documentation
# Catch-all target: route all unknown targets to Sphinx using the new # "make mode" option. $(O) is meant as a shortcut for $(SPHINXOPTS). %: Makefile @$(SPHINXBUILD) -M $@ "$(SOURCEDIR)" "$(BUILDDIR)" $(SPHINXOPTS) $(O)import sys, os import sphinx_rtd_theme
Source: netgen.io
Elasticsearch vs. Solr vs. Sphinx: Best Open Source Search Platform Comparison
We will not make comparisons like Sphinx vs Solr, or Solr vs Sphinx, or Sphinx vs Elasticsearch as they all are decent competitors, with almost equal performance, scalability, and features. But each of them has specific peculiarities that can be influential for your project. Now, let’s take a look at which option can be better for your business.
Source: greenice.net

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Lucene should be more popular than Sphinx Search. It has been mentiond 26 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.

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 / 8 days 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 / about 1 month 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 / about 2 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 / 5 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 / 10 months ago
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Sphinx Search mentions (10)

  • Best 5 Ecommerce Search Engines for Developers
    Sphinx is a search engine that can be integrated into a website to provide advanced search functionality such as full-text, Boolean, and faceted search. It is a powerful open-source search engine that can handle large amounts of data and quickly return results. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
  • Question about embedding for search vs clustering applications
    Have been using Sphinx. It does some processing around suffixes, tenses, and so on, and looks at word proximity (BM25), but is definitely limited. Source: about 2 years ago
  • grep like search with preprocessing
    Lucene is the thing you think you need. Elastic Search is a nice wrapper for it. But these are Java, so maybe you want Sphinx Search (C++) or MeiliSearch (Rust). Source: over 2 years ago
  • Search MySQL table for multiple keywords and return number of occurrences for each keyword per row
    Using a natural language search will almost certainly be a better solution and PHP may not be the best tool for this task. Figure out how you are going to get the text out of the PDF and where you are going to put it. Look at things like sphinx and full text search in boolean mode for doing the keyword matching. Source: over 2 years ago
  • How to do a Scryfall-like search?
    In practice though you don't do any of this, you get a library to do it for you. I've used Sphinx Search in the past for some fairly hefty (In the order of terabytes), and there's a good book covering how to get it all set up and started. Source: almost 3 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Lucene and Sphinx Search, you can also consider the following products

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

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

Doxygen - Generate documentation from source code

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...