Overview
Search is a competitive advantage for giant sites like Pinterest, Amazon, and Netflix. Algolia is search for app developers who see search as a necessity, rather than a competitive advantage. If you actually want to build best-in-class search into your app using Algolia, be prepared to pay for it. The more advanced and secure your search engine is, the more it ends up costing.
Algolia is:
- Fast
- Easy to use, and 3.) Easy to integrate.
Algolia would honestly be more appealing had it started before Elasticsearch. Now, they’re just having to play catch up to a very vibrant open source project. Algolia touts that they are a “search platform,” but they aren’t even scratching the surface in terms of comparative popularity to Elasticsearch. They easily integrate with tools like Magento, Woo Commerce, WordPress, Heroku and more. While this may seem impressive, Elasticsearch integrates with more tools. It has more advanced features, and will continue to gain more as the market matures. Any customer who chooses Algolia is locking themselves into a search engine than competes with the open source technology used by Etsy, Pinterest, Netflix, Spotify, and loads of other tech companies. Hmm…
Algolia has a reputation for being expensive, which they recently combatted by releasing a version for $479/mo. This offers more features than their starter plan, and honestly, you can’t really build a decent search engine without it. This plan gives you decent query rules that allow you to do stuff like boost certain results ( = free in Elasticsearch) based on IP address or profit margin. These are fairly standard things that search-based sites do. They give you control over how search results are sorted. You also get access to their API, which is what you’ll need if you want to do Kibana-style ( = free) reporting.
So now into personalization and AI-based search, which is the secret sauce a lot of the cool kid tech companies are using to differentiate their products. This costs no less than $3500 a month, and requires an annual contract. You need this plan to build complex drill down search that allows for broader faceting ( = free in Elasticsearch with complex aggregations), or even serve results based on search history, account characteristics, or geography. Personalization sounds advanced, but it’s really not when you think about how prevalent it is. At that price, our team will actually hop in your Slack channel or on a call, and help you with Elasticsearch. That’s $42,000 a year. We will help you with architecture, and you’ll likely still have some money left over for custom development.
Not only is the product itself expensive, Algolia forces you into the “Contact Us” tier just to get dedicated infrastructure and enterprise support. So safe to say, you will pay over $42,000 a year if you care about enterprise hosting/support that you can get from Bonsai for $14,000 a year.
This is particularly important in the banking and healthcare sectors, who will likely require dedicated infrastructure but may not want to pay this much simply for search.
Summary
If your team:
- Doesn’t see search as a competitive advantage you are willing to build,
- Is willing to pay at least $6000 a year for decent search, and $42,000 for dedicated
and/or personalized or advanced search,
- Will take straightforward documentation/ease of use over more capabilities,
- Doesn’t want to even think about infrastructure or sharding,
- Thinks a proprietary search engine that is a few years old can compete with a vibrant
open source technology that is ten years old,
Algolia is for you. If not, stay away.
Have a look at Algolia’s detailed feature set at the bottom of this page.
Key Phrases to Keep Customers Off of Algolia:
“What features are you looking to incorporate in your search engine?” → find equivalent in ES “Do you foresee your team planning to customize or test your search configuration?”
“Have you looked at how much those features cost in Algolia’s pricing model?”
Faceoff
Strengths
- The easiest way to get powerful functionality out of search.
- Awesome, easy to read documentation.
- Completely hosted. Customers don’t even need to understand sharding.
Weaknesses
- Proprietary and not as robust as Elasticsearch.
- You basically have to sell your firstborn just to get the functionality that Elasticsearch offers for free.
Positioning
Turnkey powerful search
Repositioning
Bonsai takes the pain out of Elasticsearch. Why pay for a proprietary search engine when the open source version is better?
Pricing Comparison
Not really an apples to apples comparison. Basically, you pay not to have to learn anything about search.
Their Target Market
Mostly front end developers. Algolia is popular in the JavaScript community.
Market Presence
Gaining traction, especially among front end developers.
Quick Tips
Point out how much you have to spend just to get basic stuff already in Elasticsearch. Algolia is slick, but a simple Google search of “Elasticsearch (feature)” shows that Elasticsearch does everything it does, and much more.
How to Win
Do the math. You can get the basics out of Bonsai for much less. You can also get advanced features with the help of our team, and still save money. Have Dan, Dru, or Rob hop on a call to highlight Elasticsearch’s capabilities.
When to Walk away
When a customer sees search as a pain to solve rather than a competitive advantage, and doesn’t care about the lost opportunities of choosing a much more robust technology.
