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Elasticsearch vs Shopify: What are the differences?

# Introduction
Elasticsearch and Shopify are two popular tools in the tech industry. Both serve different purposes and cater to specific needs of businesses. Understanding the key differences between Elasticsearch and Shopify can help in determining which tool is best suited for a particular project.

1. **Data Management**: Elasticsearch is a search engine that is used for full-text search and analytics, providing fast and relevant search results. On the other hand, Shopify is an e-commerce platform that helps businesses create and manage their online stores, handling product listings, orders, payments, and more.

2. **Use Case**: Elasticsearch is commonly used for managing and searching large volumes of unstructured data, making it ideal for log analysis, monitoring, and search applications. Meanwhile, Shopify is designed for businesses looking to set up an online store, offering tools for inventory management, customer support, marketing, and sales.

3. **Scalability**: Elasticsearch is horizontally scalable, meaning it can easily handle an increasing amount of data by adding more nodes to a cluster. In contrast, Shopify is a cloud-based platform that takes care of scalability, allowing businesses to focus on growing their online stores without worrying about infrastructure.

4. **Programming Language**: Elasticsearch is primarily based on Lucene and designed to work with JSON documents using RESTful APIs, making it flexible for developers to integrate with various programming languages and frameworks. Shopify, on the other hand, uses its own proprietary programming language called Liquid for customizing templates and themes.

5. **Cost Structure**: Elasticsearch is open-source, providing a free version with additional paid features under the Elastic Stack. Shopify, on the other hand, offers subscription-based pricing plans based on the size and requirements of the online store, with additional charges for transaction fees and add-ons.

6. **Support and Community**: Elasticsearch has a strong community of developers and contributors, providing extensive documentation, forums, and support resources for troubleshooting and development. Shopify offers 24/7 customer support along with a comprehensive knowledge base and community forums for users seeking assistance.

# In Summary, understanding the key differences between Elasticsearch and Shopify, such as data management, use cases, scalability, programming language, cost structure, and support, can help businesses make informed decisions when choosing the right tool for their specific needs in search and e-commerce solutions.
Advice on Elasticsearch and Shopify
Rana Usman Shahid
Chief Technology Officer at TechAvanza · | 6 upvotes · 391.7K views
Needs advice
on
AlgoliaAlgoliaElasticsearchElasticsearch
and
FirebaseFirebase

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!

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Replies (2)
Josh Dzielak
Co-Founder & CTO at Orbit · | 8 upvotes · 294K views
Recommends
on
AlgoliaAlgolia

Hi Rana, good question! From my Firebase experience, 3 million records is not too big at all, as long as the cost is within reason for you. With Firebase you will be able to access the data from anywhere, including an android app, and implement fine-grained security with JSON rules. The real-time-ness works perfectly. As a fully managed database, Firebase really takes care of everything. The only thing to watch out for is if you need complex query patterns - Firestore (also in the Firebase family) can be a better fit there.

To answer question 2: the right answer will depend on what's most important to you. Algolia is like Firebase is that it is fully-managed, very easy to set up, and has great SDKs for Android. Algolia is really a full-stack search solution in this case, and it is easy to connect with your Firebase data. Bear in mind that Algolia does cost money, so you'll want to make sure the cost is okay for you, but you will save a lot of engineering time and never have to worry about scale. The search-as-you-type performance with Algolia is flawless, as that is a primary aspect of its design. Elasticsearch can store tons of data and has all the flexibility, is hosted for cheap by many cloud services, and has many users. If you haven't done a lot with search before, the learning curve is higher than Algolia for getting the results ranked properly, and there is another learning curve if you want to do the DevOps part yourself. Both are very good platforms for search, Algolia shines when buliding your app is the most important and you don't want to spend many engineering hours, Elasticsearch shines when you have a lot of data and don't mind learning how to run and optimize it.

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Mike Endale
Recommends
on
Cloud FirestoreCloud Firestore

Rana - we use Cloud Firestore at our startup. It handles many million records without any issues. It provides you the same set of features that the Firebase Realtime Database provides on top of the indexing and security trims. The only thing to watch out for is to make sure your Cloud Functions have proper exception handling and there are no infinite loop in the code. This will be too costly if not caught quickly.

For search; Algolia is a great option, but cost is a real consideration. Indexing large number of records can be cost prohibitive for most projects. Elasticsearch is a solid alternative, but requires a little additional work to configure and maintain if you want to self-host.

Hope this helps.

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Decisions about Elasticsearch and Shopify
David Swift

We devised SwiftERM to generate additional income from existing consumers on ecommerce websites. Available for those using Shopify, Magento, Woocommerce or Opencart, it runs in alongside (not instead of) existing email marketing software like Mailchimp, Drupal or Emarsys. It is 100% automatic so needs zero additional staff. It uses predictive analytics to identify imminent consumer purchases. The average additional turnover achieved is 10.5%. It is the only software in the world authorised to send Trustpilot to send product ratings in outbound emails. Developers and ecommerce retailers are invited to try to it for free, to establish viability this predictive analytics system is. SwiftERM is a certified Microsoft Partner MPN ID 6197468.

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BrandLume Inc
President at BrandLume · | 3 upvotes · 80.3K views

we've had alot of shopify clients and do alot of those website builds, but we decided a little while back to transfer any client possible to woocommerce, for our e-com web development, as there is alot more functionality available with zoo-commerce. you can have a look at our examples and even our own website in the link provided.

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Pros of Elasticsearch
Pros of Shopify
  • 328
    Powerful api
  • 315
    Great search engine
  • 231
    Open source
  • 214
    Restful
  • 200
    Near real-time search
  • 98
    Free
  • 85
    Search everything
  • 54
    Easy to get started
  • 45
    Analytics
  • 26
    Distributed
  • 6
    Fast search
  • 5
    More than a search engine
  • 4
    Great docs
  • 4
    Awesome, great tool
  • 3
    Highly Available
  • 3
    Easy to scale
  • 2
    Potato
  • 2
    Document Store
  • 2
    Great customer support
  • 2
    Intuitive API
  • 2
    Nosql DB
  • 2
    Great piece of software
  • 2
    Reliable
  • 2
    Fast
  • 2
    Easy setup
  • 1
    Open
  • 1
    Easy to get hot data
  • 1
    Github
  • 1
    Elaticsearch
  • 1
    Actively developing
  • 1
    Responsive maintainers on GitHub
  • 1
    Ecosystem
  • 1
    Not stable
  • 1
    Scalability
  • 0
    Community
  • 23
    Affordable yet comprehensive
  • 14
    Great API & integration options
  • 11
    Business-friendly
  • 10
    Intuitive interface
  • 9
    Quick
  • 3
    Liquid
  • 3
    Awesome customer support
  • 2
    POS & Mobile
  • 1
    Dummy Proof
  • 0
    Nopcommerce

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Cons of Elasticsearch
Cons of Shopify
  • 7
    Resource hungry
  • 6
    Diffecult to get started
  • 5
    Expensive
  • 4
    Hard to keep stable at large scale
  • 1
    User is stuck with building a site from a template

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What is 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).

What is Shopify?

Shopify powers tens of thousands of online retailers including General Electric, Amnesty International, CrossFit, Tesla Motors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Foo Fighters, GitHub, and more. Our platform allows users to easily and quickly create their own online store without all the technical work involved in developing their own website, or the huge expense of having someone else build it. Shopify lets merchants manage all aspects of their shops: uploading products, changing the design, accepting credit card orders, and viewing their incoming orders and completed transactions.

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May 21 2019 at 12:20AM

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What are some alternatives to Elasticsearch and Shopify?
Datadog
Datadog is the leading service for cloud-scale monitoring. It is used by IT, operations, and development teams who build and operate applications that run on dynamic or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Start monitoring in minutes with Datadog!
Solr
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.
Lucene
Lucene Core, our flagship sub-project, provides Java-based indexing and search technology, as well as spellchecking, hit highlighting and advanced analysis/tokenization capabilities.
MongoDB
MongoDB stores data in JSON-like documents that can vary in structure, offering a dynamic, flexible schema. MongoDB was also designed for high availability and scalability, with built-in replication and auto-sharding.
Algolia
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.
See all alternatives