Algolia vs Solr

Overview

Algolia

Stacks1.4K

Followers1.1K

Votes699

Solr

Stacks805

Followers644

Votes126

Algolia vs Solr: 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, Solr is detailed as "An open source enterprise search server based on Lucene search library, with XML/HTTP and JSON APIs, hit highlighting, faceted search, caching, replication etc". Solr is the popular, blazing fast open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, near real-time indexing, dynamic clustering, database integration, rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling, and geospatial search. Solr is highly reliable, scalable and fault tolerant, providing distributed indexing, replication and load-balanced querying, automated failover and recovery, centralized configuration and more. Solr powers the search and navigation features of many of the world's largest internet sites.

Algolia and Solr are primarily classified as "Search as a Service" and "Search Engines" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Algolia are:

Database search
Multi-attributes
Search as you type

On the other hand, Solr provides the following key features:

Advanced Full-Text Search Capabilities
Optimized for High Volume Web Traffic
Standards Based Open Interfaces - XML, JSON and HTTP

"Ultra fast" is the top reason why over 120 developers like Algolia, while over 33 developers mention "Powerful" as the leading cause for choosing Solr.

Medium, StackShare, and Product Hunt are some of the popular companies that use Algolia, whereas Solr is used by Slack, Coursera, and Zalando. Algolia has a broader approval, being mentioned in 258 company stacks & 54 developers stacks; compared to Solr, which is listed in 140 company stacks and 42 developer stacks.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Algolia, Solr

Rana Usman

Chief Technology Officer at TechAvanza

Jun 4, 2020

Needs adviceon

Firebase

Elasticsearch

Algolia

Hey everybody! (1) I am developing an android application. I have data of around 3 million record (less than a TB). I want to save that data in the cloud. Which company provides the best cloud database services that would suit my scenario? It should be secured, long term useable, and provide better services. I decided to use Firebase Realtime database. Should I stick with Firebase or are there any other companies that provide a better service?

(2) I have the functionality of searching data in my app. Same data (less than a TB). Which search solution should I use in this case? I found Elasticsearch and Algolia search. It should be secure and fast. If any other company provides better services than these, please feel free to suggest them.

Thank you!

408k views408k

Comments

Julien

Principal Software Engineer at Tophatter

Dec 26, 2020

Review

The Amazon Elastic Search service will certainly help you do most of the heavy lifting and you won't have to maintain any of the underlying infrastructure. However, elastic search isn't trivial in nature. Typically, this will mean several days worth of work.

Over time and projects, I've over the years leveraged another solution called Algolia Search. Algolia is a fully managed, search as a service solution, which also has SDKs available for most common languages, will answer your fuzzy search requirements, and also cut down implementation and maintenance costs significantly. You should be able to get a solution up and running within a couple of minutes to an hour.

42.1k views42.1k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Algolia	Solr
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.	Solr is the popular, blazing fast open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, near real-time indexing, dynamic clustering, database integration, rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling, and geospatial search. Solr is highly reliable, scalable and fault tolerant, providing distributed indexing, replication and load-balanced querying, automated failover and recovery, centralized configuration and more. Solr powers the search and navigation features of many of the world's largest internet sites.
Database search;Multi-attributes;Search as you type;Analytics dashboard; Ranking; Mobile; Search in any language;Understand users mistakes;Smart Highlighting;Realtime indexing;Protect your indexes from misuse;Discover realtime faceting;Search objects by location	Advanced full-text search capabilities; Optimized for high volume web traffic; Standards-based open interfaces - XML, JSON and HTTP; Comprehensive HTML administration interfaces; Server statistics exposed over JMX for monitoring; Linearly scalable, auto index replication, auto-failover and recovery; Near real-time indexing; Flexible and adaptable with XML configuration; Extensible plugin architecture
Statistics
Stacks 1.4K	Stacks 805
Followers 1.1K	Followers 644
Votes 699	Votes 126
Pros & Cons
Pros 126 Ultra fast 95 Super easy to implement 73 Modern search engine 71 Excellent support 70 Easy setup, fast and relevant Cons 11 Expensive	Pros 35 Powerful 22 Indexing and searching 20 Scalable 19 Customizable 13 Enterprise Ready
Integrations
React Ruby Jekyll JavaScript React Native Vue.js WordPress Shopify Docusaurus VuePress	Lucene

What are some alternatives to Algolia, Solr?

Elasticsearch

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).

Typesense

It is an open source, typo tolerant search engine that delivers fast and relevant results out-of-the-box. has been built from scratch to offer a delightful, out-of-the-box search experience. From instant search to autosuggest, to faceted search, it has got you covered.

Amazon CloudSearch

Amazon CloudSearch enables you to search large collections of data such as web pages, document files, forum posts, or product information. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can create a search domain, upload the data you want to make searchable to Amazon CloudSearch, and the search service automatically provisions the required technology resources and deploys a highly tuned search index.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service

Amazon Elasticsearch Service is a fully managed service that makes it easy for you to deploy, secure, and operate Elasticsearch at scale with zero down time.

Manticore Search

It is a full-text search engine written in C++ and a fork of Sphinx Search. It's designed to be simple to use, light and fast, while allowing advanced full-text searching. Connectivity is provided via a MySQL compatible protocol or HTTP, making it easy to integrate.

Azure Search

Azure Search makes it easy to add powerful and sophisticated search capabilities to your website or application. Quickly and easily tune search results and construct rich, fine-tuned ranking models to tie search results to business goals. Reliable throughput and storage provide fast search indexing and querying to support time-sensitive search scenarios.

Swiftype

Swiftype is the easiest way to add great search to your website or mobile application.

MeiliSearch

It is a powerful, fast, open-source, easy to use, and deploy search engine. The search and indexation are fully customizable and handles features like typo-tolerance, filters, and synonyms.

Quickwit

It is the next-gen search & analytics engine built for logs. It is designed from the ground up to offer cost-efficiency and high reliability on large data sets. Its benefits are most apparent in multi-tenancy or multi-index settings.

Dejavu

dejaVu fits the unmet need of being a hackable data browser for Elasticsearch. Existing browsers were either built with a legacy UI and had a lacking user experience or used server side rendering (I am looking at you, Kibana).

Related Comparisons

Some of the features offered by Algolia are:

Database search
Multi-attributes
Search as you type

On the other hand, Solr provides the following key features:

Advanced Full-Text Search Capabilities
Optimized for High Volume Web Traffic
Standards Based Open Interfaces - XML, JSON and HTTP

"Ultra fast" is the top reason why over 120 developers like Algolia, while over 33 developers mention "Powerful" as the leading cause for choosing Solr.

Algolia vs Solr