Algolia vs. Elasticsearch

In the previous section, we outlined how Algolia compares with open source search engines. Equipped with that knowledge, here are some important considerations for you and your team:

• Will building and maintaining a complex system from scratch give your company a competitive advantage?

• How much revenue is your company losing because of a less-than-stellar search experience?

• How long can you afford to wait before delivering a cutting-edge user experience?

• Are your dev team’s time and resources better spent on maintaining search or on developing your company’s primary product or service?

In-house development challenges:

• over 50% of businesses couldn’t adaptx fast enough to trends
• 2 in 5 lacked the necessary expertise
• over 1/3 had insufficient development staff

At Algolia, we devote 100% of our time and resources to developing and innovating a world class search capability for our clients. We think you should be able to focus as much time on your core product as well.

Algolia lets you do this by saving time and resources and delivering results. In the following sections, we’ll show you how our search and discovery solution makes integration flexible, fast, and easy, as compared to an open source solution like Elasticsearch.

With A Ready-Made, Fast-To-Implement Solution

Algolia scales for more than search volume. It empowers tech and business leaders to use search as a launchpad for innovation. Our platform offers tools that help businesses make smart choices about content, search, and index settings.

We considered Elasticsearch, but building it ourselves would have easily taken 2 to 3 times as long as implementing Algolia. It took maybe a day or two for an initial prototype within our application, and a week or so to develop a production ready version. - Ram Gudavalli, Co-founder, CTO @Sense

Developers love the versatility of Elasticsearch. The sky’s the limit for what you can build. The problem is, there can be 10 different ways of doing the same thing.

If the end-goal is consumer-grade search, you ultimately have to focus down on your particular use case. Building a ranking formula from scratch and defining a text relevance strategy is a highly specialized skill. To do it in Elasticsearch, you’ll need an expert team and lots of time to iterate and test.
When you start with DIY foundations, everything stays DIY. Developers have to tap into their own IT communities or find new ones to learn how to build out particular components and navigate the implementation. The time it takes adds up fast.

With Algolia, companies can go from initial scoping to live implementation in less than a week. A single sprint is enough to deliver a final version.  Front end libraries and API clients reduce time to implement by integrating easily and effortlessly into your tech stack. Extensive documentation and client support are available 24/7 to help guide the way.

[Algolia] allowed us to build a website without having to build a backend with a specific database. We can just throw stuff into the index and it works.
 - Fernando Padilla, Software Engineer @WeWork

With robust infrastructure already in place

Algolia operates 400 clusters in 16 different regions and 70 worldwide data centers. Running our own distributed architecture lets us provide 99.999% Service Level Agreement (SLA) and 100% API uptime.

By managing everything related to search infrastructure, deployments and back end upgrades, Algolia helps businesses stay lean and laser-focused on their core offerings.

With Elasticsearch, you’ll need infrastructure, including servers and engineers to operate those servers. Maintaining that infrastructure, including software updates and backward compatibility, will fall to you and your teams.

Rather than taking on excessive infrastructure overheads, future-forward organizations should build cutting-edge business functionality instead.

700 locations, 2.5m Queries with easy inventory maintenance - WeWork

With security and transparency

With added infrastructure comes added security responsibilities. While Elasticsearch provides tools to secure the software layer of your search solution, securing your entire stack again requires a dedicated and knowledgeable team.

Get 99% uptime  without the cost of full-time security engineer.

Recently, several internet-facing Elasticsearch instances were targeted with ransomware attacks. Security researchers recently discovered vulnerabilities in other Elasticsearch instances on Amazon Web Services (AWS) that left customer records, including credit card information, partially exposed. The fact is that companies choosing to build, configure and maintain search on their own take on higher levels of risk.

Furthermore, if you run an Elasticsearch instance through cloud infrastructure, your uptime is limited to what your cloud provider offers in its SLA. AWS’s offer of 99% uptime might sound impressive, but 1% over an entire year translates to major downtime – 3.5 days. Better speed and higher SLA in Elasticsearch require someone working full-time to manage security updates. For most companies, that’s one salary too many spent on search, not core offerings.

Algolia has a specialized security team that manages all aspects of network defense:

• ensuring all servers and data centers meet the highest industry security standards
• managing software upgrades, with no impact on service
• deploying multi-layer access control to protect infrastructure
• running continuous security testing through a public bounty program and regular pen tests
• sharing transparent information about how we build and fix things
• communicating openly and clearly about any major security matters

We also monitor our API performance in 50 locations worldwide and share the information on our API status page.
 

With lower engineering costs

Elasticsearch’s relatively low monthly subscription can be a big draw. However, with Elasticsearch comes hidden operating and maintenance costs that you’ll need to budget and pay for – especially as these can build incrementally over time.

Dodge hidden costs
Reduced capacity to innovate
Endless maintenance
Slower time to value
Wasted developer resources

To run and maintain Elasticsearch effectively, you’ll need to hire specialized relevance engineers or spend time upskilling your existing team. Both routes will need considerable time and staffing investments.

86% Of former open source customers have seen 100+% Increase in dev productivity with Algolia

With Algolia, the initial cost may be higher, but there’s never a need to supplement existing engineering resources. Post-implementation costs are low and entirely predictable.

With a superior developer experience

While Algolia and Elasticsearch are both popular search options, Algolia is simpler for developers of all skill levels to configure, deploy, and innovate. It’s designed so any developer can roll out a highly powerful, advanced search on their own and quickly. Without previous search-building experience, developers using Elasticsearch can get bogged down in details

Using ElasticSearch was a nightmare to maintain with very approximative results. Switching to Algolia make things so easy develop, maintain and customize. - Chief technology Officer (CTO), Small Business Healthcare Company

The following Algolia differentiators make it easy to dive in and get to work:

1. A working knowledge of JavaScript is sufficient to build most aspects of the UI
2. it’s easy to move data back and forth between API clients and servers
3. Algolia maintains API clients for all important programming languages and platforms
4. Algolia’s support team members are the same people who build Algolia; they’re easy to talk to and know the product backwards and forwards
5. Algolia documentation is written and updated by a dedicated team of developers and technical writers

The implementation and maintenance of Algolia was and is extremely easy. We just had to pull and API and could start powerings any experience. - Fernando Padilla, software engineer  @WeWork

With opportunities for non-developers

After a brief initiation to the Algolia dashboard, anyone with minimal tech savvy – from product managers, digital strategists, ecommerce marketers and omnichannel strategists – can understand the relevance formulas and update them as needed. More importantly, they can leverage Algolia’s analytics features for valuable insights into clicks, 
queries, user behaviours, and search-to-conversion data.

With that opportunity and that knowledge, leaders across the business can impact search and drive critical business KPIs.

Most business-side users are used to waiting in ticket queues for tech teams to implement changes to search formulas. Now they’re empowered to take immediate action. Algolia’s capacity to extend search usability to non-developers is a true game-changer.

From a time-intensive search tool to a fast, intuitive one. - Product Manager, Under Armour

With a launchpad for innovation

For Elasticsearch aficionados, adopting an alternative search tool can feel like a step back. The problem is, Elasticsearch’s technical demand can be a drain on the rest of the organization. Simple changes need complex coding. Small updates require significant effort and can inadvertently cause breakages elsewhere in the system.

With Algolia, engineers quickly roll out an incredible platform, then share the keys to the kingdom with people in the organization who need freedom of action to make changes and drive growth. Merchandising teams can gain insights and make changes through the visual editor. They can pin, boost, and bury items, and create business rules to run promotions. 

96% of developers surveyed say Algolia saves them time on the back end, giving them more time to innovate and create and spend less time managing back end operations and business. - Source: TechValidate survey of 192 Users of Algolia

Instead of building relevance from scratch, debugging, and making sure updates don’t break, your engineers can devote their skills and expertise to valuable enhancements and innovations, such as:

• fine-tuning relevance using business data and analytics
• adapting relevance strategy to events or seasons
• digging into long-tail queries and content
• fighting data deficiencies with synonyms

These activities do more for business goals than spending time on search basics that Algolia has already solved. With tech and business teams working in parallel, everyone does their jobs better. That’s when you see significant ROI

With higher ROI and lower TCO

Business leaders know that search is essential. Even so, 47% say they either haven’t invested in search or haven’t invested enough. It’s hard to play catch-up to soaring customer expectations, and the bill can be steep. Today’s economy is forcing businesses to do more with even less.

Companies used to building from scratch sometimes get sticker shock when they start shopping for solutions. Seen next to Algolia’s price tag, Elasticsearch’s affordable monthly license could look like a cost saving strategy.

After doing the math, it’s another story. It takes time and resources to build stable, secure search with Elasticsearch. Any upfront savings will soon be exhausted on additional engineers. Upkeep and customization will keep racking up costs down the road for an inflexible system that non-experts can’t directly use, change, or optimize.

Algolia shows significant return on investment, with companies averaging 382% ROI with payback under 6 months.

Lower $ <- Average cost of ownership -> Higher $$$
Algolia                                                           ElasticSearch

After three years using Algolia 
(Forrester Research’s Total Economic Impact (TEI) study):

• Revenue uplift from re-ranking search: $859.1K
• Revenue uplift from recommendations: $1.2M
• Merchandiser time savings from automation: $225.6K
• Developer time savings building new apps: $1.6M
• Developer time savings on maintenance: $549.0K

Source: Forrester Researcher’s Total Economic Impact (TEI) Study