Searchkick vs Sphinx: What are the differences?

Searchkick: Intelligent search made easy. Searchkick learns what your users are looking for. As more people search, it gets smarter and the results get better. It’s friendly for developers - and magical for your users; Sphinx: Open source full text search server, designed from the ground up with performance, relevance (aka search quality), and integration simplicity in mind. Sphinx lets you either batch index and search data stored in an SQL database, NoSQL storage, or just files quickly and easily — or index and search data on the fly, working with Sphinx pretty much as with a database server. A variety of text processing features enable fine-tuning Sphinx for your particular application requirements, and a number of relevance functions ensures you can tweak search quality as well.

Searchkick and Sphinx can be primarily classified as "Search Engines" tools.

Some of the features offered by Searchkick are:

• stemming - tomatoes matches tomato
• special characters - jalapeno matches jalapeño
• extra whitespace - dishwasher matches dish washer

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

• Output formats: HTML (including Windows HTML Help), LaTeX (for printable PDF versions), ePub, Texinfo, manual pages, plain text
• Extensive cross-references: semantic markup and automatic links for functions, classes, citations, glossary terms and similar pieces of information
• Hierarchical structure: easy definition of a document tree, with automatic links to siblings, parents and children

Searchkick is an open source tool with 4.96K GitHub stars and 582 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Searchkick's open source repository on GitHub.