Azure Search vs Solr: What are the differences?

What is Azure Search? Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development. 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.

What is Solr? 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.

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

Some of the features offered by Azure Search are:

• Powerful, reliable performance
• Easily tune search indices to meet business goals
• Scale out simply

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

"Easy to set up" is the primary reason why developers consider Azure Search over the competitors, whereas "Powerful" was stated as the key factor in picking Solr.