Algolia vs Elasticsearch: What are the differences?
Developers describe Algolia as "Developer-friendly API and complete set of tools for building search". Our mission is to make you a search expert. Push data to our API to make it searchable in real time. Build your dream front end with one of our web or mobile UI libraries. Tune relevance and get analytics right from your dashboard. On the other hand, Elasticsearch is detailed as "Open Source, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine". Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine capable of storing data and searching it in near real time. Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats and Logstash are the Elastic Stack (sometimes called the ELK Stack).
Algolia and Elasticsearch can be categorized as "Search as a Service" tools.
Some of the features offered by Algolia are:
- Database search
- Multi-attributes
- Search as you type
On the other hand, Elasticsearch provides the following key features:
- Distributed and Highly Available Search Engine.
- Multi Tenant with Multi Types.
- Various set of APIs including RESTful
"Ultra fast", "Super easy to implement" and "Easy setup, fast and relevant" are the key factors why developers consider Algolia; whereas "Powerful api", "Great search engine" and "Open source" are the primary reasons why Elasticsearch is favored.
Elasticsearch is an open source tool with 42.4K GitHub stars and 14.2K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Elasticsearch's open source repository on GitHub.
Uber Technologies, Instacart, and Slack are some of the popular companies that use Elasticsearch, whereas Algolia is used by Medium, StackShare, and Product Hunt. Elasticsearch has a broader approval, being mentioned in 2000 company stacks & 976 developers stacks; compared to Algolia, which is listed in 258 company stacks and 54 developer stacks.
What is Algolia?
What is Elasticsearch?
Why do developers choose Algolia?
- Ultra fast123
Why do developers choose Elasticsearch?
- Powerful api318
- Open source226
- Restful213
- Free94
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What are the cons of using Algolia?
What are the cons of using Elasticsearch?
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AlgoliaMaxime is a big supporter of Product Hunt, recognizing the continual request that I add search to the product from others in the community. Having seen many frustrating search implementations on other sites, I assumed it would be hard to integrate and provide something useful. Algolia proved me wrong (see the results here: http://producthunt.co/search).
I'm impressed with the speed and amazing support from the Algolia team. The dashboard analytics and management are incredibly useful, providing insight into how people are using the product and ability to act on those learning without changing a line of code. I would highly recommend it.
AlgoliaHaving a great search engine is extremely important for our app store. We find that users love to search, not only when they know what they are looking for but also to discover content around different themes.
In a very rushed period with lots of things to do in parallel, we found that Algolia offered a high quality solution that perfectly solved our problem and we had a first version working great in less than a day.
We also enjoyed getting their feedbacks and ideas to help us improve our search and we are now using Algolia in our internal tools as well. We strongly recommend them!
AlgoliaWe were looking for a better search solution for GrowthHackers.com for a couple months. All the options we looked at were either too complicated to setup, didn't have the features we needed, or were too expensive. Algolia hit the right balance for us. It's super fast and easy to customize, and the documentation and examples for getting started are great. Most importantly though, their support rocks. It's always a pleasure talking with their team.
AlgoliaI'm Antonio, TVShow Time's CEO, a startup that has more than 100k+ active users.
Before Algolia, we were using Elastic Search that was costing a lot (hosted on 2 big EC2 instances) and with results that weren't that relevant.
Then we switched to Algolia, in 1 hour. We were blown away by how easy the integration was for such a good relevance in results and high performance.
AlgoliaWe tried a lot of services at Socialcam to handle our massive user base. All of them couldn't handle that number of users.
Algolia handles it without any problem but on top of that, it does it at full speed: we get results back in under a few milliseconds. Last but not least, it does it with error handling, which is great as typos are very frequent on mobile...
ElasticsearchElasticsearch is the engine that powers search on the site. From a high level perspective, it’s a Lucene wrapper that exposes Lucene’s features via a RESTful API. It handles the distribution of data and simplifies scaling, among other things.
Given that we are on AWS, we use an AWS cloud plugin for Elasticsearch that makes it easy to work in the cloud. It allows us to add nodes without much hassle. It will take care of figuring out if a new node has joined the cluster, and, if so, Elasticsearch will proceed to move data to that new node. It works the same way when a node goes down. It will remove that node based on the AWS cluster configuration.
ElasticsearchThe very first version of the search was just a Postgres database query. It wasn’t terribly efficient, and then at some point, we moved over to ElasticSearch, and then since then, Andrew just did a lot of work with it, so ElasticSearch is amazing, but out of the box, it doesn’t come configured with all the nice things that are there, but you spend a lot of time figuring out how to put it all together to add stemming, auto suggestions, all kinds of different things, like even spelling adjustments and tomato/tomatoes, that would return different results, so Andrew did a ton of work to make it really, really nice and build a very simple Ruby gem called SearchKick.
ElasticsearchWe use ElasticSearch for
- Session Logs
- Analytics
- Leaderboards
We originally self managed the ElasticSearch clusters, but due to our small ops team size we opt to move things to managed AWS services where possible.
The managed servers, however, do not allow us to manage our own backups and a restore actually requires us to open a support ticket with them. We ended up setting up our own nightly backup since we do per day indexes for the logs/analytics.
ElasticsearchElasticsearch has good tooling and supports a large api that makes it ideal for denormalizing data. It has a simple to use aggregations api that tends to encompass most of what I need a BI tool to do, especially in the early going (when paired with Kibana). It's also handy when you just want to search some text.
ElasticsearchSelf taught : acquired knowledge or skill on one's own initiative. Open Source Search & Analytics. -time search and analytics engine. Search engine based on Lucene. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents.
AlgoliaAlgolia helps us search across disparate pieces of information in our staff portal, and allows customers to easily jump around the portal between devices, support conversations, and documentation.
AlgoliaThis is the bedrock of kako.pk - it not only serves the JSON data, it doubles as a (very fast) web-server if you connect to the client JS widget libraries
AlgoliaWe use algolia to power our product search / filtering (https://www.shoesofprey.com/shoes).
AlgoliaWe started with Algolia, but switched to our home-backed full-text search solution. It's serverless, based on Lunr.js
AlgoliaFor detailed searching listing and products posted by customers