Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups
Register | Login

Xapian VS Sphinx Search

Compare Xapian VS Sphinx Search and see what are their differences

Contents:
  1. » Base Details
  2. » Reviews
  3. » Alternatives

Xapian logo Xapian

Xapian is an open source probabilistic information retrieval library, released under the GNU...

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.
  • Xapian Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-21
  • Sphinx Search Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-08

Xapian features and specs

  • Open Source
    Xapian is open-source software, which means it is free to use and you can modify its source code to fit your specific needs.
  • Flexibility
    Xapian provides great flexibility with its API, allowing users to create complex search applications with customizable features.
  • Language Support
    Xapian supports bindings for multiple programming languages, including Python, C++, PHP, Java, Perl, Ruby, and Tcl, making it accessible to developers with different technical stacks.
  • Search Features
    Xapian offers advanced search functionalities such as probabilistic ranking, phrase search, Boolean search, and wildcard search, which enhance the user search experience.
  • Scalability
    Xapian is designed to handle large volumes of data, making it suitable for applications requiring scalability.

Possible disadvantages of Xapian

  • Complexity
    Setting up and configuring Xapian can be complex and may require a steep learning curve, especially for users unfamiliar with search engine technologies.
  • Documentation
    Although Xapian has documentation, some users find it lacking in depth, which can be a hindrance to those trying to leverage advanced features efficiently.
  • Limited Ecosystem
    Compared to more popular search engines like Elasticsearch, Xapian has a smaller ecosystem and community, which can limit the availability of plugins, integrations, and community support.
  • Performance
    While Xapian is scalable, very large-scale deployments might see performance challenges, necessitating additional optimization or the use of more robust solutions.
  • Maintenance
    Being a less mainstream option, finding ongoing maintenance and support professionals familiar with Xapian might be more challenging than with more widely used alternatives.

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.

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Xapian and Sphinx Search)

Xapian

Sphinx Search

Custom Search Engine
52 52%
Custom Search Engine
48% 48
Custom Search
56 56%
Custom Search
44% 44
Search Engine
36 36%
Search Engine
64% 64
Search API
100 100%
Search API
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using Xapian and Sphinx Search. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Xapian and Sphinx Search

Xapian Reviews

We have no reviews of Xapian yet.
Be the first one to post

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

Sphinx Search might be a bit more popular than Xapian. We know about 10 links to it since March 2021 and only 7 links to Xapian. 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.

Xapian mentions (7)

  • Making a huge collection of PDF's searchable (They are OCR'd already)
    Recoll is free/open source (GPL) that can index PDFs and search them very quickly. It uses Xapian under the hood. I have over 165,000 documents indexed on an old laptop running Linux and can query them all in a split second. Source: over 1 year ago
  • An alternative to Elasticsearch that runs on a few MBs of RAM
    + xapian which has been around a while, and while gpl licensed, is quite capable https://xapian.org/. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • ZincSearch – lightweight alternative to Elasticsearch written in Go
    Tangentially related if you need search without the clustering and high availability story of elastic search and friends I highly recommend Xapian. Its like the SQLite of search. Single library that provides the basic set of features you would expect in a quality search experience: facets, ranked search, boolean operators, stemming etc etc. https://xapian.org/. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • Need CLI tool that can handle large txt files and another tool that can conduct a lightning fast search of disk files.
    For fast searching, it usually requires indexing the files in question. There are a number of text-file indexing solutions, many of which use xapian, sphinx, or lucene/solr under the hood. Based on conditions (watching files/directories, cron jobs, new-mail triggers, etc), they'll add/remove files to the index, and you can then use a corresponding command to compose queries across that data. If it's indexed, it... Source: over 3 years ago
  • Lawsuit filed alleging Google is paying Apple to stay out of the search business
    There is also xapian/recoll https://xapian.org/ which works great for "desktop" search. - Source: Hacker News / over 3 years ago
View more

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: over 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: almost 3 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
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

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

ElasticHQ - Tool for ElasticSearch management and monitoring.

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

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.

Elastic Stack - Meet the search platform that helps you search, solve, and succeed

OpenSearch - OpenSearch is a community-driven, open source search and analytics suite derived from Apache 2.0 licensed Elasticsearch 7.10.2 & Kibana 7.10.2. It consists of a search engine daemon, and a visualization and user interface, OpenSearch Dashboards.

Loading...